


In the Company of Demons

by stele3



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, BDSM, F/M, Fucked Up Shit, Multi, Other, REALLY FUCKED UP SHIT, Rough Sex, Succubus, Violence, au after season 1, fraternal sketchiness, non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-22
Updated: 2013-02-22
Packaged: 2017-12-03 06:52:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/695444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stele3/pseuds/stele3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Dean hunt a succubus in LA and get way more than they bargained for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Company of Demons

**Author's Note:**

> Just one more warning: THERE IS SOME SERIOUSLY DARK SHIT IN THIS STORY.
> 
> Also, this exists in the same universe as "The Amazing Incredible Adventures of Freakboy and Dykegirl." But you don't have to have read that story to understand this one, or vice versa.

It starts with half-drained victims in LA… only half-drained, though, and that bothers Sam. “Weird.”

Dean rakes his fingernails over the torn knee of his jeans. “Sounds like a bunch of drug addicts, Sammy, nothing weird about it. Jesus, why are we not moving?”

The last bit he says loudly to the long string of red taillights in front of them. They glare back and Dean groans, returns to picking a hole in his jeans. “This is why we stick to back roads. Jesus, gas is gonna cost a lung. And I bet there’s not a good pool game for miles.”

He goes on a while longer, as he has since they came over the Grapevine and saw LA’s dome-like haze. They’ve come South from Palo Alto, where Sam had an interview with the Stanford degree progress office about his “options.” Only options, nothing signed or decided yet, and he’s certainly not going anywhere while _The_ Demon is out there, an endless circling question mark. 

They haven’t seen it since that cabin where two thirds of their family tried to kill their own blood. They haven’t seen _Dad_ since the hospital, when he left Sam by the bed where his oldest son struggled to breathe around the hatred of another father.

There are no plans, now, no direction, only options. But Sam still came out the college parking lot to Dean at his flippant-worst, a sneer like thin ice in his eyes and a bend in his lips where something had collapsed.

The universe had an unpleasant way of fulfilling just enough of Dean’s self-prophecies for him to go on believing. It spirited away their father like a goddamn Houdini, and Dean, who doesn’t buy the idea of God despite a trunk full of holy water, believes in that. To be left behind, to be alone, is his faith, his ultimate belief the same way some people believe in a light at tunnel's finale. For Sam to _stay_ would be intolerable sacrilege. 

Sam always thought that Dean pushed his buttons, but now he knows his brother only ever poked. It’s all out now, though, and Sam’s got to get out of this car soon or he’ll give Dean a _real_ reason to think that he hates his older brother.

He keeps the rest to himself until they’re ensconced in the hotel (that Sam didn’t want to stay at and Dean insisted on). With Dean fed and his feet kicked up, Sam finally broaches the subject again. “The markings and descriptions are all right for a succubus,” he says to his laptop, not looking at Dean. “But there aren’t any corpses.”

Dean clicks the TV off and swings his legs over the side of the bed. “Can’t be a succubus, then,” he says after a moment and Sam’s shoulders ease down. “Bitch wouldn’t let go of her meal until she’s sucked and fucked him dry.”

“They’re _half_ dry. And you saw how scared all the other prostitutes were.”

“Sammy,” Dean says with infinite patience from the bathroom. “They were hookers. Bet half of them thought you were a cop, the way you kept calling them all ‘ma’am.’ I keep trying to tell you, man, a little charm goes a long way.”

Sam’s teeth set and the overworked muscles in his jaw ache. “None of them were down on that side of the street, though. If it was just a prostitute fucking with her johns or some kind of drug ring, I don’t think they’d have been as freaked out.”

The sound of falling water cuts him off. “Dean!” Sam groans. “Would you _please_ shut the damn door before you pee?”

“Since when are you an expert on the minds of hookers?” Dean calls back, completely ignoring the complaint. “You got a secret sex identity there, Prude Boy?”

Sam sighs.

-o-

“No ma’ams this time, ‘kay, Sammy?” Dean mutters as they pull to a stop on Sunset Blvd.

Sam’s just drawing breath to retort – and things are so damn close to his skin right now – but then the EMF meter on the dashboard shrieks. 

Dean shoves it under one arm, muffling the noise. The faint squeals continue, sending little spikes of adrenaline down their nerve endings. “Where?” he hisses.

Sam twists, craning his neck to peer down the street, into side streets. “Don’t know,” he murmurs back. “You think we – ”

He trails off as the meter reaches its upper echelons, an undulating wail.

A shadow passes to his right and Sam twitches away from the window. Dean’s fingers close tight on his shoulder, pinching his skin through the clothes.

The figure of a woman moves past the Impala’s hood, steps down from the sidewalk onto the street. They can’t see her face, but a frayed skirt barely brushes her thighs and her thin shoulders curve inward. She moves quick, holding herself close.

And as she walks away, the meter’s shriek drops off to a whine.

“Two seconds,” Sam says and lunges for the back seat. Dean’s already got one hand on the door handle and he waits exactly 1.5 seconds before popping out like a murderous jack-in-the-box. Sam fumbles with the Beretta, getting it caught in the bag’s strap and yanking. “Dean,” he bellows, then bites his lip hard. The gun comes free and he doesn’t bother with his door, just lunges out the open driver’s side.

Dean’s looking back at him, gun raised and eyes wide, startled by Sam’s shout. Normally he’s the loud one on a hunt, drawing attention onto himself and away from others.

The woman stands in the wide street, right on the double yellow line. Then she’s off running and Dean swears, “God _DAMmit, Sam!_ ” and he’s off, too. Sam puts his head down and chases them both, his stomach spiraling. This is all wrong: a succubus shouldn’t be running, it should stop and flash tits like a hypno-ray. And Dean should not be way beyond Sam’s reach. “Fingertips,” John said, making them stretch hands out to each other. “Never be further apart than this.”

Dean’s lean back disappears around the corner of a chain-link fence. Sam stretches his legs and flings himself after. A car blares by and he skitters like a rabbit in the headlights, barely dodging a bumper. _Jesus, forget the succubus, one of us is gonna get flattened by a semi_ , and that thought drops off into a black pit of fear and dread, colored with memory that makes him run faster.

He comes around the corner and almost slams into Dean, has to grab onto the fence to stop himself in time. “What – ”

Dean’s standing stock-still, gun raised but lax in his hand. He has to be dazed or something, because the succubus is on the ground not ten feet in front of them and Dean’s not shooting. It’s crouched _right there_ , body still pulled close, looking up at them in the flickering light of a fluorescent sign. No exposed tits, no talons bursting free, and…

His brain comes crashing to a halt with as little grace as his body.

The eyes shine liquid-black, glinting in the dark. The rest of the face is pale, drained of color. 

And against the pallid skin run thin red scars. Carved into the flesh with cold, immaculate precision.

The succubus breathes like an asthmatic. Oxygen rattles through its throat and when it speaks, it sounds like a smoker who’s spent hours screaming in the cold.

“Come on,” it croaks. It might be a trick of the light, but Sam thinks he sees the thin shoulders shudder. One side of its too-big dress falls and he tenses, but the gesture is not seductive, could never be seductive, because the exposed flesh there has a whole other set of deeper scars.

It does not seem conscious of the bare skin. Or Sam. It stares at the gun and Dean.

“Fuck you,” it spits. Its lower lip has a deep groove where one scar runs into its mouth. “Fuck you little cumstains,” but it’s crumbling, it’s shuddering and pressing hands against the filth-stained pavement. It sways above its own arms like a drunk and then the upturned face shatters inward, hopeless, gone beyond endurance or care.

Sam twitches when it hits the ground with a soft thump. Dean stays rock steady, gun still at ease.

-o-

It’s not something they discuss, beyond a terse exchange over who will carry the damn thing. Dean finally scoops her up, with Sam on his shoulder, gun ready. There’s no question of shooting her like this, whatever she is: maybe if she had fur and fangs instead of platinum blonde hair, they could shoot her while she’s down, pump her small prone body full of bullets.But she doesn’t and they can’t. Dean knows that should count as a strength, but it feels like a weakness.

The woman – _thing, dammit,_ thing – is still limp in his arms when Sam opens the hotel door and Dean shoulders past him. “Get the salt,” he grunts in passing and Sam moves quick and silent. So like a ghost these days and Dean’s heart stutters before he can shut that thought down.

He grits his teeth and hooks a foot in the motel chair, dragging it free from the table. The _thing_ ’s head lolls against his shoulder and its hair falls against his cheek and it feels human under his hands. He pulls his hands away sharply and steps back as Sam draws the salt line.

It sits there, head drooping to one side, slumped down with hair stringing over its face. The dress hangs loose, exposing a wire-thin collarbone etched with reddened tissue.

Dean sits on the bed, shakes out his arms. Feels Sam looking at him, wondering what the plan is. ‘Cause Dean’s always got a plan. He’s got to. There isn’t anyone else.

“Quit looming,” he says to Sam, who sits on the bed beside him. On his shoulder, like always. Silent, like always. It takes a lot to get anything out of Sam lately, and when it does it usually comes out as a yell. Which is better than nothing, of course: Dean _gets_ Angry Sam, the Sam who screams venom. Angry Sam can’t stand him, but at least Dean _gets_ that. Quiet Sam is a whole other mystery. 

The thing in the chair slowly opens its glassy black eyes and roves a bit before landing on them.

Dean’s got his gun out, held between his knees. Less of a threat and more of a promise. _It_ doesn’t react and Dean’s not too sure that it registers anything at all. The face has fine edges of skeletal.

A long moment passes in which Dean suddenly remembers that he’s the one with a plan, but by the time he’s got the start of one the thing in the chair has started to speak. “Well,” it says. “Do you want to get your dicks in first, or is this a death-only show?”

Dean’s fingers twitch around the gun; but there’s no heat to the words and its smile vanishes like it hasn’t got the energy for even that much. Dean licks his own lips, steadies himself mentally. “Do you know who we are?”

“Sorry, baby, I don’t keep up on the Hollywood scene.”

“We’re not actors. We’re Winchesters.”

Another long silence. “Oh,” it says faintly. “Death, then.”

The gun feels heavy in Dean’s hand. He opens his mouth and hears Sam’s voice instead. “What happened to you?”

His voice is husky and gentle, the same tone he uses for bereaved mothers and Dean stares at him, wordless with fury that he would talk to _it_ like that. Sam meets his eyes long enough to catch the anger and reflect it back, then turns pointedly away, back to their visitor.

It’s watching them but not in a calculating way. “Did some stupid, stupid things,” it murmurs, lips barely moving. “And now I’m being punished.” It cocks its head to one side, dirty hair falling into its face. “Even demons have rules.”

“So you _are_ a demon,” Dean asks low and level.

“I don’t know what I am anymore.”

“Something made you human?” Sam asks incredulously and Dean wants to scream at him, tell him to stop talking to it, stop letting it _in_. This was the dumbest fucking idea, why didn’t he just shoot her while she – _IT_ – was down? Dad would never make this mistake…

It exhales once, hard. “They made me _wrong_ ,” it chokes, and it gets up, slow and staggering. Then it hauls its dress off right there in front of them.

Dean’s on his feet, too, expecting something like this but not expecting… _this_ because, _Jesus,_ they’re everywhere. The scars envelop every limb and beside him Sam makes a noise in the back of his throat.

They are horrific; they are vicious; they are mesmerizing. Its body, pushed to the edge of malnutrition, has not one ounce of appeal on its own, but as a canvas it is magnificent. Long, deep cuts arc across it with precision that could make a sculptor weep. Every slash runs opposite to its curves, invalidating the natural form and overpowering it with a design of implacable, merciless violence.

And following the curve of a scar down her hip with his eyes, Dean feels his body surge to life. He wants to cross the salt line, to push her down onto the table behind her and drive inside her skinny, bruised body. The scars are raised against her white skin and Dean’s tongue moves unconsciously against the top of his mouth, imagining what it would feel like to lick that line on her hip, or better yet, add to it, his own mark on her body, shit he’s got a knife under the pillow already…

Distantly Sam says, “Oh my God.”

Dean sucks in a breath and it hurts. The thing hunches down again, folded in around its own scarred body. “They made me _wrong_ ,” it whispers, the words like an open wound in the air.

Dean has to think about every movement, stepping away and tucking the gun into the back of his jeans. Then he walks out of the apartment into the night air.

-o-

Sam follows after a few moments. The succubus seems to have spent all her energy, because after Dean leaves she sits down and goes limp, hair sliding forward to hide her face. She’s not going anywhere, with or without the salt lines, and Sam needs to get out of the room like _five minutes ago_.

They’d been prepared for a succubus, for temptation and the jokes about hard-ons that let them ignore the clawing need these things could arouse. But this… this is different. Terrifying. This is sex and – and _violence_ , dragged out from some corner of his brain into the light.

Sam shudders and curses his treacherous body for getting just a little more excited at that thought.

He saw Dean’s face when he left. Sam’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to know how this is affecting his brother. But there’s no third party here, nothing else to fall back on, just the two of them. “You okay?” Sam asks, leaning against the wall beside the door. Dean’s further out in the light-filled night. He isn’t moving very much, but Sam can see awkwardness in the way he holds himself and knows that Dean’s been hit with a dose of the same thing.

“Sure,” Dean says instantly. “Fucking succubus.”

“I don’t know if she’s that anymore.”

Dean rounds on him. “ _It_ ,” he says viciously, “is fucking with our heads. And you’re letting it.”

Sam’s temper kicks up hard. “You ever seen or heard of a succubus like this?” The kind that made you want to _hurt_ instead of _obey._

Dean’s lips curl and he turns away, looks out into the night.

When they come back inside she/it has her dress back on and her/its black eyes watch them. Dean stops near the door, but Sam steps a little closer, eases back down to sit on the bed. “The scars… it’s some kind of spell?”

Her lips twist. “Does it _look_ like a spell? This is little more permanent than your herbs and rhymes. I still need to feed; I still need _men_.” The black eyes rake Dean and flash with unmistakable hunger. Sam tenses but in the next moment it’s gone and her gaze dulls. “I used to have you dicks groveling at my feet and now the only ones I can get are the… _pushy_ kind.”

And she casts a meaningful glance over them both.

Sam clasps his hands together between his knees. The other prostitutes had said something to that effect… don’t bother looking too hard, baby, they got what they needed and they needed what they got. Four of the seven victims who reported abnormal occurrences of fatigue had violent criminal records.

Dean buzzes soundlessly by the door, like a high-tension wire looking for ground.

His brain doesn’t want to wrap around that thought so Sam pushes it away. His own dick has stayed twitchy, and ain’t that a pleasant revelation? Sam says carefully, “You know about us?” She gives him a telling glance, full of ‘oh, come _on,_ ’ and for a flickering moment she looks like the woman she’s pretending to be. “Then maybe you know about the demon that hurt our family. Where it is.”

Dean straightens, takes a step forward. Sam can feel his protest, a soundless _no_. Sam doesn’t look over, keeps his eyes on her.

 _She_ looks at Dean, though, slides the black orbs of her eyes back and forth between them. “You’re joking, right?” she says after a minute.

Something cold runs its finger down Sam’s back. “What do you mean?”

Her scarred, split lips slowly part, eyes narrowing to bright flashes. “It’s here,” she rasps slowly. “In LA. You weren’t hunting it?”

There is no air in the room. Her eyes widen and she tilts her head back until it settles with a bump against the chair.

“Then, my dear,” she murmurs, “I would guess that _it_ is hunting _you_.”

“Bullshit,” Dean spits.

She says nothing, moves not one muscle of her face except for her eyes. They trace over Sam and Dean, lining their limbs and bones. Seeing their mortality and reflecting it back at them. “Call up the hotel front desk. One of its children is on lookout, watching you.”

Dean stands his ground, gun moving very slightly as he shifts his grip. It’s Sam who gets up, goes to the phone. His fingers shake as he dials and he holds the phone’s body in one hand, pulling it off the desk so he can turn back and meet her gaze.

The phone rings twice before a male voice answers. “Front desk.”

She looks up at him steadily from inside her ring of salt, drowning in her oversized dress.

“Christo,” Sam says into the receiver, and hears a hiss like four thousand snakes.

-o-

Sam needs stitches, no surprise. They lay over the previous scars, warm and too familiar. If scientists took a cross-section of Winchester flesh, they’d find layers and layers of old wounds like the striped walls of the Grand Canyon. 

Dean’s dislocated his shoulder and wants to get the hell out of Dodge. Sam holds fast and Dean gives in, if only because it’s familiar and Sam hasn’t pushed back against him in a while. They still argue all the way to her hospital room, teeth gritted against the wounds inflicted by demons and each other.

They stop arguing when they open the door to find a male nurse with his pants off and a hand jammed up her hospital gown. She’s awake, godammit, and her eyes are screwed up tight, hands in fists where she’s being held down.

The nurse has a look on his face that Dean associates with vengeance and bar room brawls. He breaks the guy’s nose, pushes him down. “Get out.”

It’s Sam’s turn to carry her, fast as they can go out the back door.

-o-

They’re too beaten up to skip town, so they settle for getting a second hotel as far from the smoking ruins of the _first_ one as they can. The evening news reports a tragic fire that claimed the lives of thirty travelers, businessmen, and families on road trips. 

Dean yanks the bed away from the wall, circles it with rock salt. The succubus lies atop the sheets, wearing a hospital gown and Sam’s jacket. The nurse left fresh bruises on her wrists. Sam looks at those marks and feels a burn of desire trace from his gut to his groin.

Dean sits ramrod straight, chair positioned between the beds and the door, vigilant, gun ready. Darkness circles his eyes and he’s laid sigils on practically every flat surface. Sam pulls the other chair over beside his brother and sinks into it. 

They sit together, staring at the woman/thing on the bed. Sam speaks first. “I looked at her chart.”

“Don’t, Sam,” Dean says, but he sounds more weary than angry.

Sam turns toward his brother, anger sparking. “One of us needs to know what the hell we’re doing.” Dean’s profile is blank and Sam flinches, tries to reel himself in. “I just wanted to know. There wasn’t anything… no red flags. The doctor thought she had malnutrition and that she’s been physically abused. She’s got half a dozen old fractures that haven’t healed right. But he didn’t mention anything about hidden talons or horns or anything else _not_ human.”

Dean’s got nothing to say to that, just sits in silence. After a while Sam lies down on the other bed and sleeps until noon.

When he gets up it’s almost as if the world hit a pause button overnight: she’s still asleep and Dean still sits in the chair, gun on the table next to him, keeping watch. But a new bandage covers the cut on her face and the comforter has been pulled up. Sam’s jacket lies across the foot of his own bed.

-o-

It – fuck, _she_ – woke up last night and Dean changed the dressing on her cheekbone. Four stitches, right beside the older marks. If Sam and Dean’s body are layers of sediment pressed and held together with experience, then hers is a painting, everything thrown at the surface in a wild array of bruises and scars and small bones.

Her black eyes watched him go into the bathroom and return with their kit. Watched him step over the salt line and settle on the bed beside her. His hands, frustratingly, shook just a little, but he set about cleaning and re-dressing the wound carefully, as much to prove to her that he could as to prove it to himself. 

Every beat of his heart echoed through his body and when he pulled back the bandage the hunger lunged up to swallow him, and he _almost_ raked a fingernail across the stitches. 

His curled finger stopped, poised like a claw just above her eye. She did not look at it. Her gaze met his and stayed there, locked together, neither of them breathing.

In the other bed, Sam’s snores went on undisturbed. Dean swallowed and leaned over her, swabbing with peroxide. When he finished and stepped back over the salt line, he released an embarrassingly long breath that he hadn’t been aware of holding.

She did, too. She sat up, propped with her elbows, and tracked him to the bathroom and back to his chair. There was something like anger in her face, and uncertain fear.

Dean sat back down in his chair, ignoring her face, ignoring his aching dick, ignoring the beat that had pounded through him ever since he’d seen her crouched on the sidewalk. _Hurt hurt hurt, hurt her_ and he sat perfectly still until she went back to sleep.

Now, in daylight, with Sam rolling over and picking at his eye boogers, the beat has faded to a whisper and Dean says, “Gonna go get some breakfast. You want something?”

Sam looks at him. Blinks and nods.

-o-

It’s a gesture of trust, Dean leaving him in the room like this, alone with _her_. ‘Course it’s only for a few minutes, Dean’s back soon with bagel sandwiches from the grocery store across the street. Three of them, to be exact.

Dean shrugs. “You’re the one who thinks she’s mostly human, dude.” Which is another concession and Sam would be joyful if he weren’t so groggy. But that’s Dean for you. It’s too early in the morning for brotherly heart-to-hearts about trust or respect, and Dean knows it.

The woman (or whatever) rolls over and sits up slowly. Sam leans over the salt lines to uncertainly hand her the sandwich. But she does eat it, fast enough that Sam worries about stomach blockages and Dean hands her a bottle of water.

When she’s done, though, she doesn’t look any less hungry and that’s a whole ‘nother worry.

-o-

They head out the next day, after the LA Times reports arson. 

She sleeps most of the way to Vegas, wakes up as they’re driving through the desert. Sam glances back periodically until he finds her eyes open and staring out of the window to the dry world beyond. For all the scars and fresh bruises, she looks better. She doesn’t even seem to mind the handcuffs holding her to the door.

Vegas shines with false idolatry, the pagan gods of fortune making deals left and right among the glitter of false rhinestones. Sam calculates the distance from LA, wonders how a demon moves, if there are wormholes or private jets.

On the way through the main drag of town she announces casually to the window, “Another one of your demon’s kids lives in there.”

It’s a strip club. Dean slows and Sam twists in his seat. “You sure?”

Her eyes glitter hard and bright. “Why don’t you walk in and ask?”

-o-

This battle with their pursuers goes better than the first, but when they get back to the car after a lengthy exorcism, the handcuffs dangle empty.

Sam closes the side door hard, inexplicably angry. “Hey,” Dean growls warningly from the driver’s side. “Just ‘cause your little girlfriend’s run off doesn’t mean you have to hurt mine.”

But she comes back that night, pounding on their door and dragging them out of sleep. “What the _fuck_ ,” Dean wrenches the door open and goes still.

She’s got blood on her chin, spilled down the front of her dress. The stitches on her cheek have re-opened and one of her eyes is swollen shut.

Dean is frozen and it’s Sam who has to catch her this time. He kicks a hole in the salt line and drags her into the bathroom, but with both arms gingerly wrapped around her ribcage he can’t do much else.

“Dean?” he calls, craning his head around. “Can you…” he trails off. Dean stands in the doorway, face white and gripping the wall. 

“No. I – Sammy, I… I can’t.”

Sam looks at his brother’s eyes and goes cold. There’s something there he doesn’t recognize, and after twenty-four years of life wound around each other, that is a prospect more terrifying than death. 

Dean backs away, into the bedroom’s darkness. 

Sam swallows hard; it’s in him, too, that hot, burning thing that _wants_ this woman’s blood on him. There’s warm wetness on the front of his T-shirt, seeping through to his skin. When he looks down, there are swathes of red where her face presses against his chest. The bright, wet proof of her pain sends his own blood rushing to his dick. Sam groans, bowing his head and closing his eyes tight. He stays like that until his arms begin to shake from the effort of holding up her limp body.

Finally, she shifts just a little and croaks, “Let me go.”

He does, gratefully, and stumbles backward to bump against the sink. He watches her put a hand on the wall, leave a bloody handprint there, and his whole body shudders.

Her eyes, when she raises them, shine and one tear traces across the reopened cut below. Probably stings like Hell and Sam moans faintly at the thought before he can stop himself.

She hears him and smiles, broken, empty, hollow. There’s blood on her teeth. “My punishment,” she whispers hoarsely. “I need men, and every time… every time…” Her eyes close again and she slides her other arm down to press between her legs, face twisted up in pain.

Sam turns and walks out, pulling the door shut behind him. He stands on the other side until the lock clicks.

-o-

Dean never thought of himself as a coward. Well, okay… he spent two weeks outright refusing to acknowledge Sam’s whole Stanford/leaving revelation. _And_ he has yet to call his father after he learned that begging, pleading, _bleeding_ wasn’t enough for John to break free of a demon’s hand, that Dean _lying_ in a pool of death-blood didn’t mean enough…

Still, excluding the question of family, Dean doesn’t peg himself as the type who can’t suck it the fuck up and get on with whatever need getting on. Fact of the matter is, that’s his trademark.

But this… _her_.

He sits beside the hotel pool, coughing on a cigarette. He hasn’t smoked since he was sixteen and Sam had a crying fit about the Black Death. Dean patiently explained that the plague came from rats, not cigs, then threw out his last pack. There’s a gas station next door, though, and now the smoke comes out of his mouth in a slow, undulating stream. He doesn’t blow it so much as let it drift, lingering behind his teeth and making his tongue taste bitter.

This… this goes beyond fucked up. He’s sitting down by a pool smoking while Sam is upstairs, dealing with a wounded semi-succubus. Former succubus. Whatever. Dean has to get his ass back up there. He will. He’s not a coward.

The smoke curls across his palate, almost but not quite erasing the phantom taste of her blood. _She_ could taste it, no doubt: it looked like she’d had a cut lip, maybe bit her tongue. Maybe both… it’d gone down over her chin onto her neck. If he put his hand there and squeezed, her skin would be slippery underneath his fingers, sliding slick, her small heart beating fast against his palm…

Dean chokes, coughs, and doubles over, gritting his teeth.

-o-

Hands seize and shake Sam. “Get the fuck up,” a voice says in his ear. “It’s coming.”

He lumbers upward from sleep and in the unguarded moment between conscious and unconscious it _hits_ him. Everything she is crowds into his waking senses and he grabs the hand on his shoulder and wrenches her down across the bed. He twists on top, pinning her helpless.

She makes a sound of pure agony and Sam blinks, stares down. Her face is closed up tight, skin stretched and white with pain.

After a second of labored breathing, she chokes again, “It’s coming.”

The light in the bathroom flickers, an electric storm illuminating the whole room. Sam blurrily wonders if he should replace the bulb.

The other bed is empty.

Sam gets off her, races to the door. He throws it open and shouts into the night, “ _Dean!_ ”

His brother’s already at the top of the stairs. All the outside lights flicker, too, and cast a strobe effect on Dean’s wide eyes. “She said…” Sam struggles to breathe around the tangle of panic, “she said it’s coming.”

“No shit,” Dean grits, and his gaze runs over the row of doors beside theirs before he plows into the room.

She’s up, too, but just barely, swaying on her feet beside the bed. When they come into the room she takes a step back, but then comes forward again and rides the wave of their movements out the door, down the stairs. “You taggin’ along?” Dean snaps and she makes no reply except to scramble in the back seat when Sam holds the door open.

Dean peels out so fast they almost slam into the side of the building.

-o-

For once Sam readily pops in one of Dean’s tapes and they listen to ZZ Top all the way to Winnemucca, breaking across the landscape like rabbits trying to zig-zag away from a predator.

When they stop to eat, she devours a cheeseburger, a double order of French fries, part of Sam’s steak, and a large slice of chocolate cake. The waitress stares at the scars and she smiles wide and disingenuous, says, “I’ve been at war.”

When the waitress and the smile have both vanished Dean finally speaks. “So I don’t suppose you got some kind of name?”

She cocks her head at him, lips curving very slightly at the ends. Sam can see how she was once beautiful, with all that platinum hair and exotic dark eyes. But it’s like a layer of skin that’s been shed, leaving behind something small and ugly beneath.

After a moment of thought she gently asks, “How about Mary?”

Dean’s fork clicks loudly against his plate. Sam sets his glass down. Her smile turns bitter, smirking. A challenge. “Pretty name, don’t you think?”

“Fuck you,” Dean says quietly. He’s at his most dangerous when he goes quiet. “Pick a different one.”

“No,” says Mary, and pops a French fry between her split lips.

Dean glares until she laughs, the sound a rasp. “Demon, boys. Or ex-demon. Whatever. You gonna eat that?” She jabs a fork at Sam’s side salad.

“So what’s the story?” Dean asks, eyes still hot. “Why do you keep saving our asses?”

She cuts him a look from those _eyes_ , all black depths and no hint of color. “Quid pro quo. I save yours, you save mine.”

“From what?”

She looks away then, says to the fries, “My family.” Her fingers, shiny with grease, are still.

-o-

She disappears again that night, comes back with a black eye and bruised ribs and blood between her thighs. She pukes and sobs into the toilet until she finally just curls up in a nest of towels like a dead thing. Sam tries to sit with her, but all he can do is stare at her hair and imagine it wrapped around his hand, the way her eyes would tear up as he yanked her head back.

Dean goes out and doesn’t come back till dawn.

Sam sits on the bed and watches both doors all night.

-o-

Things last that way through Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming. Mary disappears, comes back halfway through the night looking like shit. Dean leaves, comes back in the morning smelling like alcohol and sex. 

In the breaths between, Sam jerks off on the bed – it keeps the hunger down – and goes to patch up Mary. Then he buys breakfast at 3 AM and waits for Dean to get back. No one sleeps much.

Things stretch slowly to the breaking point and Sam sometimes wonders why they’re doing this at all. But then she’ll mutter something about a passing bus driver or wake Sam with a shout. He’ll call Dean, who is somehow never more than two minutes away, and they’ll do a fire-drill evac just as the lights start to flicker.

They’re running, no if or buts about it. The world seems suddenly full of blackened eyes lurking in every corner. It’s close on their tails now… or maybe it always loomed over their footprints, trailing and watching, and it’s taken Mary to pull aside the curtain. _I have plans for you, Sammy_.

So it becomes a question of endurance vs. death. Rock, meet hard place.

Dean, exhausted and driven to distraction by his own body, can dredge up the faintest amusement when he recognizes that they’ve definitely chosen the proverbial (and literal) hard place.

-o-

In Bend she runs across a cattle rancher. Her back has crisscrossing marks from his riding whip.

“I didn’t know a succubus had to feed this much,” Sam says from his station at the bathroom door. They’ve progressed that far, to him standing in the doorway so he can step in when needed. He spends most of the time studying his feet.

Mary spits blood into the sink and wipes her mouth. “We don’t. The fucks I get now are scraps. Imagine having to eat nothing but rotting garbage, 24/7.”

She twists around and stares at herself in the mirror, touching the marks with a ginger fingertip. Sam looks away.

-o-

Things switch around when they hit Portland. Mary returns from the night in one piece with an honest smile. “Found an S&M club. The less repressed, the more control.”

Dean freezes with his jacket half on. Sam looks back and forth between them and blurts, “Let’s get breakfast.”

Dean pulls the jacket on the rest of the way. _She_ stands at his elbow. He can’t not seem be aware of her, every second, and the thought turns his stomach. “It’s 1 AM, Sam.”

“There’s a 24-hour restaurant down the street,” she suggests. “Shari’s.”

Shari’s turns out to be a low-rent version of Denny’s, which translates into the dead-eyed waitress telling them “Don’t order any fish.”

When she leaves, Mary laughs. It’s loud and genuine and even she seems startled by it. Dean’s chest unwinds and his mouth forms a smirk. “Wow, classy place.”

Sam snorts into his menu with something like relief. He kicks back, stretching out and she follows suit, sliding down to rest her head against the seat. There’s color in her face and Dean can’t look.

One side of her mouth turns upward as she looks back and forth between the two of them. “I’m having dinner with the Winchesters. In case you don’t know, among demons that’s tantamount to ‘sleeping with the fishes.’”

Dean grins despite himself. “Hell yeah, it is.”

She rolls her eyes, taps her fingers idly on the tabletop. Sizes them up again, like she’s honestly _looking_ for the first time. “Y’know, for legendary badasses, you’re both kinda girly.”

Dean straightens up a bit. “I liked it better when you didn’t talk.”

She winks. “Most guys do.”

They both twitch and Sam chokes on his water. Instantly, her whole body flinches backward like their desire is a physical force in the air. After a minute she mutters quietly, “Old habits.”

Dean gets himself very interested in a hangnail on his thumb. By the time the food comes, Sam has stopped blushing and Dean’s dick has (mostly) calmed down.

-o-

Dean, Sam realizes quite suddenly, has never lived with a woman in his adult life. _Never_. Excluding whatever 2-week sojourn he spent with Cassie, the last Dean remembers of a constant female presence ended at age 4.

Locked away in Sam’s head is a box of _Things Dean Would Kill to Know that I Will Never Tell Him_. Foremost among these are several humiliating mishaps with female roommates, back when Sam did not have the faintest _clue_ what to do with a woman who wasn’t there to fuck him, serve him coffee, or teach him Spanish. It took several tries and thank God he’d had the chance to practice before he met Jess.

Now, Dean stands in the middle of the room, all his extraordinary grace just _gone_. “What?” he asks again, voice a little higher than normal.

Mary eyes him and underneath the scorn there’s just the faintest color of apprehension in her eyes. “You’re clearly the brawns of this operation. I said, who do I have to share a bed with. Or are you two sharing?” She arches a brow, curls one lip in the imitation of a leer. “That could be interesting.”

Dean turns a dull shade of red and whips the comforter off one of the beds. “Floor.”

-o-

For the first time in a month, Mary’s invisible warning system goes quiet. They stay in Portland five weeks, weeding out the local legends. It’s all minor stuff but they’ve been riding hard and fast these last few weeks and they could use the rest. All of them.

-o-

The whole chick thing is just… dude. It’s weird, to say the least. Dean wonders how much of it is her and how much would be this way with _any_ boob-possessing humanoid.

There are _guys_ (and by guys he means _Sam and Dad_ ) and they don’t… _smell_ a certain way. Or if they do, Dean’s nose has long since developed immunity. He doesn’t touch her, barely look at her, but still he wakes up every morning with _her_ wrapped around him, his fingers curled into fists and a galaxy of red half-moons on his palms.

He knows, beyond any shadow of doubt, that he is slowly losing his mind. There’s no other explanation for it, for the dark, fucked-up things that have come creeping out of the recesses of his brain. He’s had his fantasies, sure, even played the bad boy role to snag the homecoming queen away from her king. Left some blood on her silk prom dress, just enough to let her think she’d really walked on the wild side. And some others along the way that he remembers less specifically… usually drunk and easily cajoled into reenacting the same damn role in different towns, with prom queens several years removed whose crowns had more tarnish now than gold.

But _this_ … this is a whole ‘nother thing. This is _him_ wanting and not caring at all about what she wants or doesn’t want.

There’s this one scar in particular on the side of her face. It’s fainter than the rest, but he sees it when she cranes her neck or falls asleep with her head pressed against the window. The lines of it branch like tree roots, spreading and slashing along her jaw.

God. God.

-o-

“Dude, you are _not_ playing that in my car.”

Sam holds up one of several dozen cassette tapes he’d bought at the Saturday Market downtown. “Dean, it’s Mozart. It’s not just music, there’s… scientists have looked at this, they’ve done _studies_. People’s brains work better if they listen to just one hour of Mozart every day.”

“Sammy,” Dean says patiently. “The only way I am playing _classical music,_ ” it sounds like a four-letter word, “in my car is if Metallica is involved somehow. That tranny orchestra. They were okay.”

“The _Trans-Siberan Orchestra_ ,” Sam grits, “plays Christmas music. _This_ is timeless.”

“I never liked Mozart myself,” Mary comments from the other bed. They turn to her, but she doesn’t look away from the TV. “He’s brilliant, technically… virtually flawless. And his progressions of themes are perfect. But I’d take Beethoven over Mozart any day.”

After a minute she finally looks over. “What?”

Sam’s eyes shine, a rare grin spreading over his features. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

-o-

They drive to the coast that afternoon to chase a beach haunting. Out on the freeway, she suddenly leans past Dean and pops a cassette in the player. Her white hair trails over the side of his neck and her body’s _right there_. Then it’s not and she sits down in the back, leaves him with white knuckles on the steering wheel and a pounding heart.

The speakers blare _Ode to Joy_. Sam laughs and taps his fingers against his knees. 

Dean looks in the rearview mirror. She meets his eye and arches a brow, in challenge. He keeps looking until the eyebrow drops and her expression changes, and then he looks away.

When the chorale takes off, Sam practically bangs his head and Dean groans. _Only Sam_. In the back, Mary laughs. The sound sends shivers through Dean’s body.

-o-

She stares at the ocean with half-lidded eyes, smiling faintly. It looks unusual on her face, restive. In the fog she slips away from them a little, far enough for her silhouette to blur in the hazy morning light. They let her have her privacy.

The ghost was easy. They walk further than necessary, treading in the cold sand and prolonging the rare moment of stillness. Sam’s never seen an Oregon beach before and he doesn’t see one now. Heavy gray mist obscures the ocean renders it a sightless rush of noise. He doesn’t mean to, but he drifts away from Dean, then loses him completely in the murky dawn and has to backtrack. 

Dean has stopped exactly where he lost sight of Sam, and only moves when they come back in eyeline of one another. Dean’s face is inverted, shuttered away. Sam comes back and walks next to him, heart thumping.

The second time he loses Dean in the mist is deliberate, a test. When he comes back again, Dean stands stiff-shouldered before the ocean. He looks at Sam for just a moment with such accusing anguish that Sam shudders from more than the cold.

The next time, Dean leaves _him_ , walking in a straight line back to the car while Sam meanders along the shoreline, watching the ocean. When he looks up, Mary’s there instead of his brother.

“You keep pushing him,” she tells him, feet awash in water. “You keep thinking that he’s going to change, that no one can be _that_ determined to live and die for you. He’s not. It’ll never change, no matter how many times you leave him or he leaves you.”

Sam’s breath grates along his vocal chords. “Fuck you. You don’t know us.”

She laughs without laughter. “I know the weaknesses of men.”

They walk back to the car in silence.

-o-

Sam thinks of it first. Naturally. _College boy_.

In the middle of breakfast, he reaches over and takes her wrist suddenly. They always make a point not to touch her, so everyone sort of screeches to a halt. He swallows hard, makes his movements deliberate. Picks up the saltshaker and sprinkles a bit of the white crystals onto her hand. Nothing happens, no bubbling skin, no shriek of pain.

It’s a tossup who at the table is more surprised. “Shit,” she says, staring. “I didn’t even think to check.”

Sam sits back, rubs his fingers together where he touched her. Dean sees the little gesture and gnaws on the inside of his cheek.

At the hotel, she jumps back and forth across the salt line, first an experiment and then a game. She plants a foot on either side and puts her hands on her hips, laughing in surprise and maybe just a little bit of fear.

The sun gives her white hair a halo. Dean would find irony in that if he could.

-o-

It is, unaccountably, a huge relief to have someone else to talk to. Sam manages to feel guilty about that just a little, like somehow he’s betraying Dean. But there’s this whole _wall_ of things marked VOID. And every now and then Sam gets to throw a dart to see what select topic they could discuss for the day before Dean squirms or quips his way out of it.

So when Mary stands with her hands on her hips and says wonderingly, “If I’m going to be human, I guess I need to get a job… a house,” Sam just _knows_ this is the start of something long and complicated and probably dangerous. She stares around at the green park nestled between tall buildings and populated with statues of dead presidents.

Families sit on benches, children are bundled under the circle of their Mothers’ arms, and Mary watches them all with a strange, sad look in her eye.

Sam knows that look very, very well and remembers what she said in the diner. “Your family did this to you?” Mary doesn’t shift, doesn’t change the direction of her gaze, just raises a hand to touch the scars. “Why?”

“Because I wanted something different,” she smirks, sardonic and wounded. “Guess I got it.”

When she doesn’t give more, Sam does. “I did, too.”

She looks up into his face with perfect understanding and Sam looks away.

-o-

Portland itself is a restive place in the lull of early summer. The heavy rains of spring have passed and this Nature-obsessed city opens like one massive blossom, dogwoods and cherries along every street. Dean takes out a post office box, sends some new credit card applications.

On Cinco De Mayo they go down to the waterfront to watch the fireworks. Kids stand on their father’s shoulders, arms raised to the sky, and Sam lets slip how much he wants this, just this.

She turns to him with eyes narrowed to slits and swipes her hair back. “Waitaminute. You don’t even _want_ to hunt?”

Dean’s standing just a little bit apart on the other side of Sam. Sam feels the bite of him there, loud in his silence. “Not forever, no. I was trying to get into law school when… when it came back.”

“So if it hadn’t, you’d be a lawyer right now?”

Sam shrugs, feels a strange pressure in his stomach, the tight sense of reflected pain. “Maybe. Probably.”

“Un- _fucking_ -believable!” she snarls and the parents around her scowl. “That dumb _fucking_ daemon! I’d kill him myself if I could. If he’d just left you alone, you wouldn’t be hunting the rest of us, and everyone knows that _he,_ ” she jabs a finger at Dean, “would fall over like a tree if you weren’t around!”

Sam stares, doesn’t dare to turn. Mary snorts and shakes her head, goes stomping off. After a minute Dean goes silently in a different direction, leaving Sam alone among the cooing families as rockets burst overhead.

-o-

After Caleb and Pastor Jim went down their circle of contacts shrank quite a bit, but when Dean truly bends his mind to something, mountains obey. He finds a Wiccan priest in Eugene and through the cloud of pot smoke Dean manages to negotiate for a blessed protective charm, genuine first-born from the old country, or so the man says. There’s only one, though, and no amount of wheedling produces another. The priest offers to ask around.

It’s a small thing, just an oval bit of rock with a forked _elhaz_ carved in. Dean scowls at it, as he does when he’s nervous, then shoves it at Sam, who slides it over his head. Mary sits in the back, arms folded, pretending not to look.

“Does it work?” Sam asks.

Dean’s scowl deepens. “How the hell should I know? You’re not glowing or anything.” He twists in his seat, looks warily back at Mary. “Do something.”

Her eyebrows rise. “Do what?”

He waves a hand. “Something. You know.”

She flings him a meaningful eyebrow. He promptly squeezes his eyes shut and stuffs his fingers in his ears.

When Sam flicks his arm a few seconds later and he looks, Mary is smirking just a little and Sam’s cheeks look pink. “It works,” his little brother reports, eyes darting at her nervously.

Dean really, really doesn’t want to know.

-o-

Her hair practically forms dreadlocks before Sam steps in and takes her shopping, to Dean’s endless, snorting amusement.

In the feminine hygiene aisle Sam pauses, wondering. “Do you… y’know. Get your period?”

She stares at him, blank. He ends up giving her half of a quick sex-ed lesson in the middle of Fred Meyers, at the end of which she exclaims, “That’s disgusting.”

Sam laughs, awkward but not terribly so. “Yeah, that’s what guys always say.”

“They’re right!” Mary glares at the packages of tampons and pads in front of her, finally snatches one of each and throws them in the cart. She’s actually blushing. Sam hides his smile and leans on the cart, pushes it behind her.

The talk of uterus walls and regular bleeding rattles her a little more than she lets on, though, because she’s snappy all through the store until they get to the shampoo aisle. Then she stops and stares at the rows of hair products, eyes wide.

Sam finds something lavender-scented, pops the cap and lets her sniff it. She looks up at him, grateful and angry and terrified.

-o-

Sam turns on a History Channel special about Mayan apocalypse prophecies and Dean lounges on his makeshift bed eating cheese nachos, attention rapt. That is, until Mary sits cross-legged in a pair of sweatpants and starts combing the knots out of her shower-wet hair. Sam, who anticipated something like this, keeps his eyes on the TV and ignores the smell of rosehip shampoo. 

Dean is not so prepared. A nacho hangs frozen on the arc between the plastic container and his mouth. Cheese slowly oozes down to drip on his fingers.

After a few minutes of strained silence Mary says, “Oh. _Shit_ ,” gets up quickly, goes into the bathroom and shuts the door.

Dean gets up, too, full of awkward knees and elbows. “I’m gonna…” He jerks a thumb randomly over his shoulder and leaves his nachos on the floor, staggers out like a head trauma victim.

Her hair is pulled back and tucked away like a concealed weapon when she comes back out. She sits hard on the edge of the bed and says, “Shit. I don’t know how to turn it off. It was never supposed to _be_ turned off.”

Sam flicks the TV off, takes a breath to steady his own uneven pulse. “I can do this thing,” he says and what the _fuck_ is coming out of his mouth? “I don’t really know how it started, or why… I have dreams and they come true. And I – I moved a dresser once. Like, just with my brain. I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t know how to turn it off, either.”

She shifts on the bed to face him, a frown bringing together two scars on her forehead. “I thought you were human.”

Sam twitches and swallows hard, his stomach turning over and over. “Yeah, me too.”

Her face changes, gets quiet and thoughtful. She studies him a long moment and Sam grips the sheets. “You’re probably still human,” she says presently. His fingers don’t relax far. “Or, human as humans go. There’s been a lot more interbreeding than any of you people realize. You might have a speck of blood from something else… some dormant drop from ages ago.” She flops back in bed, stares at the ceiling. “You’ve all got this concept of humanity as this… pure, inviolate thing. Like your race exists in a big bubble and the rest of us live out in the dark.” She snorts, shakes her head. “Like _you’re_ the ‘right’ ones. The ‘normal’ ones, the righteous fucking rulers of the Earth.”

There’s a harsh edge to her voice that sounds like rocks grating together. At some point Dean came back, because he’s standing in the doorway, listening. She sees him, sits up. There’s fire in her now, a deep anger that is so, so old. “You can fight us. You can kill us. That’s fair: I’d do the same to you if I could, ‘cause everyone wants to live. But you don’t get to be _right_. No one gets to be _right_.”

“We’re not the ones that go around sucking out men’s souls,” Dean says softly. “Or setting young mothers on fire.”

“No,” she answers just as low. “And I’m not the one who fucked with your family. But you seemed pretty ready to kill me as if I had.”

Every muscle on Sam’s back tenses at the same time, winding up like a punch. “We didn’t start this war. We’re just finishing it.”

She casts him a scornful look. “Don’t give me that crap. That demon took your mommy and your girlfriend, so you go after a succubus or a ghost or a werewolf. You think we’re all the same, some big massive force of fucking darkness. Well, boys, I don’t hang out with poltergeists plotting the downfall of humanity. I want to live. I have to feed, so I do. _You_ don’t _have_ to kill things like me, but you do. So you can fight your war and you’d better, now, ‘cause we all know your names. But you don’t get to pretend to be _righteous_.”

“Like Hell we don’t.” Dean’s anger is like a wave in the air, meeting and magnifying Sam’s. Oh, this could get very ugly. “You _eat_ humans to feed yourself. We defend people who can’t protect themselves.”

Her eyes are ice-black coals. “Defending the helpless humans against everything _in_ human?”

“Damn straight.”

She jabs a finger at Sam. “So what does that make _him_?”

Sam goes cold and hesitates. Dean doesn’t. “My brother.”

Mary sits on the bed, limbs curled in around herself, and glares at them both. Then her expression wavers, cracking open, and she murmurs “Family,” in a voice of furious loss.

Sam feels like all the air has gone out of the room. After a minute she rolls over, pulls the covers up. Dean goes quickly to bed, too, and snores so loud that Sam knows he’s faking.

-o-

She heals, fills out, stops lunging at her food. Watches TV like it holds the answers to the universe. She loves CNN, smirks knowingly at the nonstop images of humanity ripping itself apart, but she also adores “Robot Battles” and “Battlestar Galactica.” 

The S&M club must be pretty damn good, because she only goes out four nights a week, then three, then only once. When they stagger in with their own bruises courtesy of a Kappa, she groans “Oh you dumb _fucks_ ” and goes back to watching TV, completely ignoring their attempts at first aid. She sleeps on the floor that night, gives Dean the bed.

Dean gets a little more used to her, this weird feminine presence that _stays_. He learns not to jump two feet when she rolls out of bed in the morning, and to run the shower for a good minute before getting into it, because otherwise it’ll smell like that goddamn shampoo Sam bought for her and Dean will have to jerk himself raw like some horny teenager or spend the rest of the day staring at the back of her neck.

-o-

They trade the charm back and forth over the next two weeks, one apiece. The first time Dean puts it on, he pauses for a long moment, then slumps. “We _definitely_ need another one of these things.”

Except when they make the trek back down to Eugene, they’ve barely pulled into the driveway before Mary lunges forward, grabbing at Dean and shrieking, “Go go _go go GO_!”

A dozen of the most beautiful women Dean has ever seen stand on the front walk of the priest’s house. Their eyes go past Dean and Sam to Mary and plump lips pull back from their sharpened teeth. Her fingers curl in the collar of Dean’s shirt, too small to reach the steering wheel, and he throws the car into reverse.

-o-

As they wind their way over the Cascade Range, Mt. Hood on their left, Sam asks quietly, “Why do they want you?”

Night has fallen and only the light of passing cars illuminates her face. “Because I haven’t died yet. They thought I would, when they gave me this punishment… they thought it would kill me. But it didn’t.”

Dean, who has been silent, swears abruptly and yanks the car over to the side of the road. It skids to a stop among gravel and Sam tenses hard, because Dean would _never_ hurt his car. His older brother spins in his seat and fixes her with a glare that Sam doesn’t need to see to know its heat. Sam tenses a little further because Dean isn’t the one wearing the charm this week.

“So,” Dean snaps, “we gonna run into a whole bitch-parade of your sisters?”

Sam can’t see her at all, just an outline. “I told you they would be after me.”

Dean makes an ugly noise and shoots an arm over the seat, grabs her shoulder. “And you’re gonna get them on us, too, is that it? Jesus _Christ,_ ” he shakes her once, hard, “we’ve already got _one_ demon and his army of brats after us, the _fuck_ I’m gonna let you bring another clan down on our heads!”

Sam swallows around the thickness of his own tongue and says evenly, “Dean. Let go of her.”

The silence that follows stretches out and out, twisting under its own weight while Mary breathes softly, ragged. Dean does not breathe at all, and then he releases a rush of air like a flood. Shoves his door open and gets out, walks away into the night.

The charm feels heavy against Sam’s shirt. “You okay?”

“Sure.” He can almost hear the shaky sharp edge of her smile. “I’ve had worse.”

Sam gets out and stands beside his brother on the treeline, where the headlight beams cast irregular shadows.

“Do you want the charm…”

“ _NO_ I do not want the fucking charm!”

The trees move overhead, creaking.

“I can’t _take_ her anymore, Sam,” Dean says, and Sam knows that it has nothing to do with a dozen beautiful women or a horde of black eyes chasing them in the shadows, and everything to do with _her_.

-o-

Portland was an oasis. Chicago is Hell on Earth. Not that their memories of the city are all that fond to begin with.

The first night they’re in town, Mary doesn’t come back. Dean goes out, circling and circling and not knowing why. Sam stays in the room with CNN turned down low.

Dean finds her just before dawn. They’re both sheet-white when he brings her back and she collapses in bed, doesn’t talk for two days. Dean disappears into the night.

-o-

Dean pushes into the girl’s cunt and she whines, bites her lip. He fucks her fast and furious, riding her along that fine line between pain and pleasure, and when he comes, it feels like defeat.

Afterwards she pulls herself together and huffs languidly, “Damn, boy, don’t bottle all that up.”

Dean says nothing, drops her off back at the bar. It’s a quick fix, a band-aid to slap on. He drives back and falls asleep in the motel parking lot, not trusting himself to even go inside anymore. _She’s_ in there and so is Sam, who can control himself, who doesn’t have this clawing, sick thing inside of him that he fucking _knows_ will break out if he sees those goddamn scars. 

Jesus, the things he wants to _do_ to her…

He’d found her sitting on the side of the street and had to sit in the car for five minutes, just breathing around the crush of want. She stared at him through the windshield, a wild animal half-broken, cornered, and baring her teeth in despairing challenge.

Even without the charm, _Sam_ can hold back. _Sam_ doesn’t want it so bad he can barely talk, think, function around the need to have, to fuck, to hurt hurt hurt. To break her, tame her, make her _his_ wild (captured) thing.

The day is easier. He drives the Impala, cleans his guns, keeps his eyes and hands to himself, but the night… the night is endless and he burns.

-o-

When Sam puts the charm on, it’s like walking into an air conditioned room from summer heat. She changes before his eyes into a small, scarred creature that glares out at the world as if even air molecules have betrayed her. 

With the charm between them, Sam can touch her scarred body and feel only a deep, empty ache, the feeling he gets when they drive away from a hunt. She is so damned _tiny_ , barely five feet tall, and he has to bend almost in half to bandage her up. When he tends to the knuckle-shaped bruises on her back, she hunches into herself and squishes peach-sized breasts under one arm, eyes following his movements in the mirror. 

His hand on her side looks huge where he holds the bandage in place. He finishes taping it, then gently dabs with cool water where she has carpet burn on the small of her back. She leans into him very slightly: it isn’t a conscious thing, her eyes are closed and he almost wonders if she’s fallen asleep on her feet.

Then he tentatively pushes her hair away from her face and she lurches backward, eyes round.

-o-

When Dean takes the charm off, everything she _is_ and everything he _wants_ comes crowding back up in the vacuum. The two seem interchangeable these days.

It’s starting to affect his moods when he’s not even around her, too. Only Sam’s awareness and several quick drives out of town have kept him from being arrested twice over for assault, taking swings when he used to throw quips. There’s always this tight, desperate feeling in his chest, like a hunted animal driven to ground. He wishes he could blame the feeling on the real, live, actual pursuit of fucking _demons_ , but if he’s honest with himself, he knows that it’s all about _her_.

When he takes the charm off, Dean forgets that this is logical and smart: she’s keeping them alive and away from The Demon, for Christ’s sake. Whatever else she is, she’s saved their asses a half dozen times over. All that melts in the rush of _wanttakeHURTnownownow_ and he stares at her for ten seconds, blind to anything else until Sam drags him bodily from the room. 

From then on they exchange the charm in parking lots and restrooms, away from her. It gives Dean some time to adjust, and the shame of that necessity burns just as hot as craving.

-o-

Sam stands in the doorway, sick. “You can _not_ go out like this.”

Mary laughs, the sound like ash on her lips. “Would you prefer I starved?”

He stares down at her, whole body aware of how close she is, at how badly she’s hurting. Somewhere behind her in the room, Dean cleans his guns with the methodical snaps of a machine. _Click click thunk snap click_.

Her eyes have nothing in them. “My punishment, Sam. Fucked or starved. They screwed me over good.”

Sam slowly, helplessly steps by and lets her out. She shivers as she crosses the threshold.

Dean puts down the shotgun barrel he’s swabbing. “You got anymore info on that black dog in Nebraska?”

Sam rounds on him before he has time to think. “What the _fuck_ , Dean?” he snarls. “How can you be so casual about this? She’s going out there to be _raped_.”

Dean’s on his feet, ice-cold. “You think I don’t know? _You think I don’t know?_ ”

Dean leaves his gear half-unpacked and disappears. Left behind, Sam sits on the bed and swears violently.

-o-

They’ve been stopped twice by cops and concerned citizens who look accusingly at Sam, and at Dean. _Did you do this to her?_

Mentally, Dean replies, _Not yet._

-o-

It’s an endurance race and Sam fails first. With his long legs, he was always better at the sprint.

When Mary comes back that night she doesn’t cry or puke or rage. Just grips the sink and leans over it, eyes squeezed shut. So Sam gets up from the bed, walks into the bathroom, leans down and says in her ear, “Next time, you come to me.”

It doesn’t happen for the longest time, so long that Sam wonders if she misunderstood and he should say it again. Except he’s not sure that he should or can, so he waits.

-o-

They leave Chicago of their own accord, no succubi or demon’s children on their tail. Just the sins of man, painted in bruises on Mary’s flesh; Chicago is an unforgiving town.

Dean pulls over in Hazard, Nebraska, because his sense of humor is _just_ that twisted. “C’mon, folks, out of the car,” he mutters. He hasn’t got the protective charm this week and quickly walks away from them into the front office. Sam has barely seen his brother in weeks: it’s always a question of which one has the charm and can stand to be around her, and which one doesn’t and can’t.

Sam sinks lower into grooves of the passenger seat worn deep by his ass and legs. This is his place in the grand scheme of things, the universe According to the Winchesters… which, lately, means According to Dean. Everything they do, from driving to checking into hotels, is driven by ritual, ordered like an assembly line. One of Sam’s first coherent memories is the overwhelming desire to never, ever be a factory worker.

He’s so lost in his own thoughts that it takes him a while to notice the subtle shift. And then he’s wearing the charm, so it takes him even longer to recognize its source.

When he finally twists around, her eyes meet his and he goes still. She says nothing and she says ‘yes.’

Dean opens up the driver’s side door and Sam jumps about three feet. His brother tosses him an irritated scowl and a room keycard. “Wake the fuck up, Sammy.”

-o-

They’re short on money and Dean makes noise about the pool hall down the street. Sam sits by the TV and says nothing to anyone. There are wildfires out West and he watches the televised flames until the door shuts behind Dean.

Then Sam swallows and switches off the TV. Gets up and slides the deadbolt and chain into place. Goes into the bathroom and closes the door most of the way, leaves it open just a crack. 

In the mirror his face is tight and dark, turned in on himself. He’s been trying for hours to get his head in the right place for this, but his hands ache from being clenched and there’s a hot, tight feeling behind his eyes. 

The charm lies against his T-shirt and Sam stares at it, traces the _elhaz_ with his fingertip until the door opens and Mary slides in next to him, angling herself so that she does not touch him despite the close range. 

She follows his gaze and meets the eyes of his reflection. Her own mirror self is as small as ever, the top of her head on level with his chest and for a second Sam’s racing heart does a full belly-flop. He’s so much bigger than she is: even if he controls himself, he could hurt her so damn easily, shit…

Black eyes stare into his and a scarred mouth smirks. “Second thoughts?” It has the ring of false bravado. 

Without looking away from her, Sam hooks both his thumbs in the leather thong and lifts the charm over his head, laying it on the edge of the sink. And just like walking into a wave of heat, her twisted, ruined power pushes in. It enfolds him, crowding his senses so hard and sudden that it makes him dizzy and he leans over the sink, eyes closed.

In the middle of rushing want, a single strand uncoils in his gut, winding up his body to his throat and pulling tight, tight, tighter until it’s a vibrating wire. His very skin shakes with it, stretching hard over the quivering energy held just inside. Smooth porcelain slides underneath his fingertips; his hands feel jittery and helpless, desperate to clutch something.

When he opens his eyes and finds her reflection looking back at him in the mirror, it’s like she reaches inside him and strums that tight wire. She stays completely still, doesn’t move at all even when he turns.

Every nerve feels raw, stripped and exposed to the air. Sam lays a palm against the door, shutting and leaning against it. It’s 15 inches down to her upturned face; she almost has to look straight up, head tilted way back to meet his eyes. A shadow falls across her face and Sam realizes it’s his, blocking the light. The visual metaphor would either make him laugh or freak the Hell out if he had a spare thought at the moment, but everything in his mind is about _her_ , the way she swallows, craned neck working. The warmth of her body, only a few inches from his. 

He takes his hand away from the door and it brushes her hair. It’s grown out a bit in the time she’s been with them and hangs to her shoulders. There’s still not a hint of color in it, sheet-white like an old man’s. Just like there’s no color in her black eyes and when her lids flicker, the tight wire sounds another chord. 

Sam reaches for her and then she’s right _there_ , pressed between him and the door. Her legs spread wide on either side of his body and one of her sandals drops from a dangling foot to bounce on the floor. 

Whatever bravado she had is gone now. Sam pushes her top up and her fingers close tight on his arms, half-resisting. The fear in her hands sends every bit of Sam’s blood into his dick and his whole body shudders. He grips her ass and pushes her hard back against the door, grinding into her. The tight feeling inside him hasn’t released: if anything, it keeps getting worse, like his vertebrae will come apart if he doesn’t get inside her _right now_.

He looks up and sees her eyes. They’re black and blank. They might as well be shut: she’s not in them. Her body’s gone limp under his hands.

It’s like cold water in Sam’s face. He takes a deep, shuddering breath and eases back. Releases his death grip on her ass and slides her down, guiding her legs to stand on their own. There’s no response in her, everything shut off and disappeared inside.

He swallows hard and closes his own eyes momentarily. Inside his jeans, his cock is painfully, spectacularly hard, throbbing in time to the dark thing in his chest; but that’s from her. There’s his own heartbeat, too, and Sam focuses on the measured stroke of that instead as he kneels in front of her. His hands follow him, sliding down her body to rest on her waist. Christ, he can feel his own fingers on the other side of her, hands wrapping all around. His fingertips curl in the top of her sweatpants and he yanks them down.

Her shirt’s still rucked up around her shoulders, and the whole expanse of her scarred skin is exposed. The sight of those curved, red slashes makes Sam’s whole body go rigid, hands curling and vision going dark for a moment like he’s being possessed. When his sight returns he’s got her hands pinned to the door and her nipple clenched between his teeth. He releases it carefully and soothes with a swipe of his tongue. Her body responds on its own, skin tightening and Sam licks his way across to the other tight bud, flicks it hard with his tongue.

She twitches, just a little.

Sam spreads his knees, sinks a little lower and curls one hand around her knee. “Put your foot on my thigh.”

Her eyes come back to blinking, surprised life. “What?” she asks, unsteadily.

“Put your foot on my thigh. Step up onto it.”

Her foot’s a dainty little thing. He guides it onto his knee and pulls her until she’s standing on his leg. It throws her off-balance: her back’s still to the door and her weight’s all on one leg.

Sam reaches out and pulls that leg away, hooks it over his shoulder. He leans forward and takes her weight as she starts to fall, holding her foot in place on his thigh and keeping his shoulder strong where her leg curls over it. Her startled hands grab onto his hair and the doorknob.

Then he stretches forward and sends his tongue into her cunt and she makes a high noise of surprise that tears through him. It’s all he can do to keep from biting down, but he grips her ankle and slides his other hand up her body to pinch and flick her hardened nipples. 

He works his tongue across her carefully, long slow swipes at first from back to front, over and over until he feels her hips move to that pace. Her hand still grips his hair and when Sam makes his tongue hard, stabbing at her clit, her fingers jump and pull at his scalp. It brings water to his eyes and he drives his nails into the skin on the underside of her breast in retaliation. She lets go of his hair and clutches at his shoulder instead, grip tightening and loosening in time to what his mouth is doing to her.

She tastes like salt, her white pubic hair brushing against Sam’s nose as he eats her out. He shifts, pressing closer and her hips jerk, bucking against his mouth. He slips one hand down from her breasts to shove her belly, pinning her back to the door. 

He holds her down and draws circles around her clit with the very tip of his tongue, light and slow at first, then increasing the speed and pressure until her belly shakes against his palm. 

She’s making high, desperate noises without words, frantically trying to move her hips. He keeps her pinned and works his tongue fast back and forth against her until she arches and comes against his mouth, one huge breath knocked from her lungs like she’s breaking the surface of water.

Sam pulls back and she goes limp, legs crumpling from under her. He eases her down, pulling her legs wide open so that she straddles his lap. Her eyes are watery, unfocused, but her lips move open just a little as he reaches between them and undoes his jeans. His movements are frantic, now, having reached the absolute end of his endurance and self-control.

He twists and swings her around to lay flat on the floor. Then he’s canting her hips upward and sinking in, deep as he can go. She stretches around him, clamped small and tight against the intrusion, and Sam groans. The thing inside him comes clawing out and he thrusts hard into her, relentless at the soft grunt of pain she makes. He fucks her in fast strokes, one hand pulling her hips into every thrust and the other planted firm on the floor above her right shoulder.

Below him, her hair has spread out in a fan from her head. She reaches up and tentatively curls one hand around the arm holding him up. The touch of her fingers is enough to make him go rigid, fingers digging into her hip as he thrusts hard and final, holding himself deep inside her as he comes. It shudders up through him and outward along his limbs, like he’s lighting up with electricity. He puts his open mouth against her narrow collarbone and the deep, curving scar there.

-o-

Sam moves first, sliding free of her body and easing to one side. He sits up slowly, back against the shower doors, and tucks himself away. His head spins a little and he’s out of breath. _So that’s what having your life energy sucked out feels like_.

Mary’s slower to rise, first to her elbows, then to her hands. There are red marks on her thighs that will bruise later, and one nipple looks swollen. “You okay?” Sam asks her, low and scratchy.

She blinks at him, eyes unreadable, then looks away.

Sam swallows and gets up, steadying himself on the wall. The charm is where he left it on the sink and he pulls it over his head, takes a deep breath of relief.

Her underwear and sweatpants sit in a puddle by the door. Mary stands up beside him and Sam hands them to her. “You can take the first shower,” he tells her, and slips out of the bathroom door.

The bedroom is dark except for the shaft of green, buzzing street light that falls in the open – _open_ – door. Dean sits in the doorway under the broken chain, a beer held loosely in his hand.

Sam freezes.

Dean’s eyes flick over him and his face twists, becomes that ugly thing that Sam doesn’t recognize _at all_. He finishes the beer in one swig, crumples the can. “You _stupid shit_ ,” he spits, gets up, and walks away from the door into the night.

-o-

Maybe Mary’s sucked away some of Sam’s IQ, because he goes running after Dean into the parking lot and that, predictably, does not end well. 

Sam always leaves because he wants to; Dean only ever leaves because he _has_ to, when staying would be dangerous. Sam lets him go, comfortable in the knowledge that he’ll always, fucking always, come back, but tonight Sammy is an idiot on many different levels. He follows, clattering down the motel steps and shouting in a whisper, “ _Dean, Dean_ …”

Dean spins and punches him hard. It isn’t the first hit he’s laid into Sam, not after a lifetime of sparring, sibling rivalry, and tempers snapped short by adrenaline. The second his knuckles his Sam’s jaw with a crack, though, Dean feels the difference of it shock up his arm.

Sam loses his balance and staggers back to land on a mix of broken pavement and gravel. That’s all wrong, too: he should have a better center, be able to rock with the hit and then swing back. Dean thinks about what’s caused Sam’s loss of equilibrium and snarls, climbing onto Sam’s prone middle to hit his face again. Sam blocks with his forearm and completes the move, tossing his elbow up into Dean’s face. Dean rears back, clutching his nose. 

“ _Stop_.”

The voice is that of a drill sergeant, inarguable steel. Mary stands atop the stairs, hardly more than an outline, but her words knock into their bodies. “If you two would prefer to _not_ get arrested tonight, I suggest you stop behaving like _children_ and get your asses up here. _Now_.”

It is, in every syllable and inflection, their father’s tone, too perfect an impersonation to be accidental. She doesn’t wait for their reaction, just turns curtly and precisely (military) back towards their room.

-o-

It takes about nine hours for Dean to cool down. They keep driving south, silence filled up by The Eagles, and Dean’s knuckles swell just as much as Sam’s jaw. In the back, Mary sleeps with her legs drawn up, toes curled underneath herself. 

When they finally stop to buy cheap fruit from a roadside stand, Dean suddenly slumps. “What the fuck are you doing, Sam?” and his voice sounds so hollow that Sam’s throat closes up and he can’t answer for a moment. They’re standing beside a mountain of fresh raspberries and the sweet smell of crushed fruit curls around them.

“I don’t know,” Sam replies, but that’s a lie, he had known exactly what he was doing, he had thought about it a whole week between the time when he made the offer and when she took him up on it – which, it suddenly occurs to him, was exactly why she had waited so long. “I just didn’t want to see her hurt again.”

“So what, you thought you’d let her vacuum your soul out through your dick?” Dean’s words are hard but he kicks the gravel, face closed up tight and cracking at the edges. “What about you? What about _you_ getting hurt?”

“Hey.” Sam spreads his arms out wide to either side. “I’m okay. It wasn’t that bad.” _It wasn’t bad at all_.

“Oh, yeah?” Dean’s angry again: he steps close and jabs a finger into Sam’s chest. “And what about tonight, Sam? You gonna let her do it again, until you’re braindead? Or just shriveled up into nothing? _No_. You hear me, Sammy? That is not happening again, not now, not ever. I don’t care if I have to tie you up and beat the shit out of you, you _are not_ doing that again.”

Irritation cuts through the knowledge that Dean is terribly, horribly afraid and Sam snaps, “Stop ordering me around.”

Dean snorts and turns on his heel back toward the car. He strides across the gravel, head down, hearing his little brother speak Spanish to the fruit seller behind him.

When he lifts his gaze, he stops on the roadside. Across the two-lane highway, she stands beside the Impala with her thin arms wrapped tight around herself. A truck passes between, but when it’s gone she’s still there, unmoving. Her hair’s pulled back, but a bit has escaped and blows across her upturned face as she looks at the overcast sky.

Another car passes close; Dean doesn’t move, shivering inside his frozen body.

-o-

A week later, Mary’s pale face still has a surprising flush of health and she hasn’t gone out to feed anywhere between Nebraska to northern Texas. Sam doesn’t know whether to feel absurdly proud or alarmed. Finally, while watching Robot Battles on their separate beds (Dean is out getting food, after looking hard at Sam), she blurts out, “What was that thing you did? When you licked me?”

Sam, who had been drinking a glass of water, chokes and has to get a towel for the bedspread. She watches him impatiently, a frown drawn between her eyes.

Finally, Sam sits down on the dry edge, conscious and cautious of the fact that it’s not his week to wear the charm. “Um…” he starts, but doesn’t know where to go after that.

To his endless surprise, she flushes again and redirects her gaze back to the TV. “Forget it.”

“Hey wait, no, umm… when we had sex?”

She doesn’t look away from the small metal creations tearing each other apart with miniature chainsaws, but her mouth works for a moment. “…I guess. I felt strange.”

Maybe he shouldn’t have felt proud after all. “Strange how?”

Her ankles uncross, flop, recross. “I don’t know,” she says at last. “It felt good.”

She has her scarred lower lip snagged between her teeth, chewing at it. Sam watches the gesture and asks carefully, “Do succubi not have orgasms?”

Her frown returns and she stares at him in utter puzzlement, which leads to the second half of an awkward sex-ed session. At the end, she sits up and folds her legs Indian-style under her. “No, we never have anything like that. Sex… it’s about feeding, not pleasure. It’s never something we’re supposed to _enjoy_.” She pauses and her black eyes slide away, running over the small room, the drab wallpaper. “We’re not supposed to enjoy anything human. It’s taboo: men are food, just animals. To suggest that they even have _thoughts_ … it’s not done.”

Her voice has the stilted sound of recitation. Something clicks into place for Sam. “But you like Beethoven.”

She does not look at him, just watches the TV. One of the robots has triumphed and spins in place, its pincer arms raised in the air. “It never happened with any of the other men,” she says, cutting him a quick glance.

Sam takes a breath, laces his fingers in his lap. “Men have orgasms all the time… every time, practically. With women it takes a bit more. The guy has to know what he’s doing and he has to _want_ the woman to enjoy herself.”

She does look at him then, startled. “You wanted me to…”

Sam blushes and shrugs loosely. “Well, I couldn’t… yeah. I did.”

Mary stares at him incredulously and Sam sits back against the headboard, ears a little warm. There’s an infomercial on now and he pretends to watch it with interest.

-o-

Dean’s going to have to kill her. Or something. Get her away from Sam by any means necessary.

Sam’s sitting in the front seat of the Impala, door open, laughing. Fucking _laughing_. The back door’s open too, and her feet are bare, curled on the seat as she examines them. “Admit it,” she insists, “toes are the strangest part of the human body. They’re an evolutionary throwback to the days when you people used to hang upside down in trees. They don’t have a _purpose_ nowadays… they’re just malformed fingers on your feet, a reminder of your primate heritage.”

“Dude,” Sam says, lounging his mile-long body against the seat, “ _you’ve_ got toes. See? They’re right there.” Sam’s not wearing the charm today and Dean’s palms are covered in cold sweat.

Mary casts him an eloquent look full of _Oh, come on_. “Only because most guys would think twice about sleeping with a toeless woman. That’d be a bit hard to explain away.”

Sam laughs again. Dean sucks on the straw of his drink, feeling a wad of food stuck in his chest. Eventually Sam unfolds from the car, stretching. “Bathroom break,” he says and lopes away toward the rest stop men’s room.

Dean crumples up his burger wrapper. “What are you doing?”

He doesn’t look at her, but she’s practically a hum in the air, pushing at his skin and trying to get underneath. Unseen by her, he touches the charm with one hand, curls a finger around it. “I’m not doing anything,” she answers. “It’s not something I can turn off.”

“Bullshit,” he says harshly. “You stay the Hell away from Sam, you hear me? If you mess with him again, so help me I _will_ put you down.”

“ _He_ came to _me_.”

“Don’t care. You stay away from him. And if he comes to you again, you tell him no.” He lets go of the charm, put both hands on the wheel. “He’s my little brother. It’s my job to protect him and I’m gonna do my job, get it?”

She doesn’t answer and Dean looks in the rearview mirror. Her face is folded in on itself, eyes bright and dead. 

-o-

They sleep in the car that night at a truck stop, curled up in their respective positions and surrounded by the endless hum of semis. The chug of engines is loud enough to disguise the door’s noise.

Dean shakes Sam awake at three. “She’s gone.”

They stagger out, guns shoved awkwardly in the back of their jeans. There’s some kind of huge mosquito hatching from the lake nearby and pretty soon they’ve got a cloud following them as they slide along the edges of the parking lot, checking the bathroom stalls, the blank car windows of fellow traveling sleepers.

“Shit,” Dean swears, swiping at the air. “Sam, look… she’s probably out feeding…”

Sam grits his teeth. “ _Yeah_. Exactly.”

“Well, shit, you heard her before.” Dean stops and Sam has to turn to face him. “Her only other option is to starve, man. It’s really fucking ugly, but that’s it.”

“That _isn’t_ her only other option,” Sam snaps, then bites his cheek.

Dean communicates a wealth of information in his pause. “I knew it. I _knew_ you were gonna do it again. Godammit Sam…”

“Wait, wait, you _knew_?” Sam strains to see Dean; his face is a pale blob in the distant street light. “Dean – did you say something to her?”

Dean hesitates for the barest moment. “No.” And immediately, Sam is _right there_ in his face, so close that Dean takes an instinctive step back.

“You motherfucker.” Sam’s voice is a low growl that makes Dean’s skin tense. “You miserable _fuck_.”

“Sam, I – ”

“Don’t. Just don’t.” The tone’s curt, dismissive. Sam turns away and heads across the parking lot, ducking to check under cars. After a moment Dean follows.

-o-

They find her beside the roadside, naked and shivering in a ditch. Sam scrambles down to her and she comes to screaming life, flailing when he tries to touch her. She scrambles away, but can’t quite get to her feet, lying facedown and sobbing into the dirt.

Dean starts to slide down to help, but Sam turns and gives him a look that makes his knees go out from under him. He sits down hard on the side of the road, the hum of mosquitoes around him.

Sam strips down to his undershirt and wraps her up, completely unmindful of the filth and blood and come. He lifts her into his arms and she slides fingers into his hair and presses her face against his neck.

-o-

Sam can feel the glances that Dean keeps sneaking at him, quick flashes out of the corner of his eye from the front seat. He doesn’t look back. Doesn’t look at Mary, either, just rests his chin gently on the top of her head and stares at nothing. If he looks at either of them, he’ll take a swing at Dean or wrench Mary’s head back and lick her bloody lips.

He makes it all the way to a motel room bathroom, where he eases Mary into cold water. She moans incoherently at the chill, but he murmurs through the rush of blood in his ears and slides towels under her head. Dean brings in a bucket of ice; Sam takes it from him wordlessly and Dean stands in the doorway rubbing his hands back and forth across his jeans.

When Sam is confident that Mary isn’t going to bleed out, he stands, takes a breath, and shoves Dean viciously in the chest.

A combination of pushing, pulling, and dragging gets them out to the parking lot, where it’s Sam’s turn to knock his brother down hard.

He stands over Dean in the early morning light and spits, “Get this. You don’t get to look out for me. Not anymore, after that. I’m not your helpless baby brother; I can make my own decisions, and they don’t involve letting a woman be gang-raped by truckers. You don’t get to do _that_ and then say that it was all to protect _me_ , because _I don’t want it_.”

Dean stays on the ground when Sam leaves, staring up at the pink dawn. An early-rising Mexican family passes by, the children glancing in his direction and the mothers shooing nervously.

-o-

Two of the credit cards bounce and they’re down to their last bit of cash. Dean fumbles the bills out of his wallet at the front desk, his shoulder aching where Sam had tossed him into the ground. The rest of him is numb and he has to pantomime through the act of buying another five days on their room. His voice is currently lodged somewhere below his lungs.

Sam refuses to budge until Mary’s better: the “DO NOT DISTURB” sign is permanently hung on the door and Dean figures that it’s as much for him as the hotel maids.

He cruises around dusty back roads, windows rolled down and wind slipping through his fingers. He plays pool with cool-eyed efficiency, fights a couple brawls and drips blood on the bills, even lifts some wallets, then races to the grocery store and buys as many supplies as he can carry before tossing the credit cards. Bitter experience has taught him that they’re only good for one big purchase before their owners call in the theft.

After the first week Sam answers Dean’s knock at the door and sighs, leaning against the frame. He has a look on his face that Dean knows from even more bitter experience. “Look, Dean – ” 

“I bought some shampoo,” Dean interrupts, handing over the bottle. Her brand. He doesn’t want to hear what Sam has to say, but there are several possibilities: that it’s okay if Dean doesn’t hang around anymore, he can go now if he wants; that Sam’s going to fuck her again no matter what it does to him; that he thinks so much less of Dean; that he doesn’t need protecting; that he doesn’t need Dean.

“Okay,” Sam murmurs softly and takes the shampoo. “Thanks.”

Dean takes the charm from around his neck and hands that over, too. It’s not like he’s going to be around her. He goes back out to sleep in the Impala.

-o-

“He thinks you hate him,” Mary murmurs while Sam gently rubs shampoo into her scalp. He’s stripped down to a white undershirt and shorts, kneeling on the edge of the shower with his hair half-damp in his eyes. The bruises on her arms where the men held her have turned yellow. “He’s always thought that you hated him, even before you ever left.”

Sam bites his lip, hand cupping the back of her head as he lets water flow down over her face. Mary shuts her eyes and leans into his grip.

-o-

Mary wakes up choking and shaking so hard her bones might actually fall apart. Sam is already there, curling fingers around her narrow shoulders. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

Her hand fists in the front of his shirt, fingers clawing his chest through the fabric. “No, it _isn’t_.” She’s sweating and trembling like a drug addict in withdrawal, which is a fairly accurate description: they’ve been locked inside this limbo of a hotel room for six days.

Sam breathes in slowly and feels it in his toes. There’s a sensation of inevitability to this, gravity pulling him in, the same way he got pulled back from Stanford, the same inescapable bullshit that seems to follow him everywhere. But with this, at least, he has a choice. The charm’s around his neck, his mind is his own, and he gets to choose.

He makes his choice, detaching her hand from his shirt and lifting the charm over his head. 

She pulls away from him, sits against the headboard, breathing unsteadily. Sam makes himself move away too, putting his feet solidly onto the carpet and walking over to put the charm on the dresser. 

It still feels like he’s been skinned and laid bare to the sun’s relentless beat; her power – not that it is a power anymore, no, now it has the rancid flavor of a curse – runs over his back, bringing every nerve to helpless life. Sam stays where he is, eyes closed, gripping the edge of the dresser. When he finally turns around, she’s still there on the bed in her thrift-store T-shirt and worn pajama bottoms. 

It’s going to hurt her; there’s no way for it not to, even if he _was_ in complete control, which he’s _so fucking not_.

There’s just enough light from the drawn windows to see her lips curl. “Best get it over with quick,” she says lightly, like it’s a band-aid to be ripped off.

Sam swallows hard against the knot in his throat. That same high-tension wire unbends inside of him, stretching tight and quivering. Ready to snap, but he sucks in a breath and holds it. “No… _no_. Fucking no. We’re not doing it that way.” There’s a note of solid iron in his voice that startles them both.

Her head cocks and her eyes on his face are wide, black wells, filling up with fear like water. “Sam,” she starts in a warning voice.

“Shut up.” The words erupt out of him and he shudders as they burn through his throat. “Shut up, just… don’t do anything for a minute.”

She closes her mouth and sits there, watching him, her whole body frozen. 

And just like that, something clicks into place for Sam. The humming wire goes suddenly, wholly, dangerously still.

After a moment he says, “Get up,” without taking his eyes off her. She only hesitates a second before survival instincts kick in and she stands on the other side of the bed, facing him. “Take your shirt off, slowly.”

Her black eyes are filled to the brim, blind fear making them, impossibly, even darker. But she curls fingers in the hem of her over-large T-shirt, inching it up over her head. It drops to the floor beside her and she stands naked to the waist, shoulders curved inward, trying to make herself even smaller.

Sam’s breathing hard, fast intakes and slow exhales. The heavy beat of what she _is_ makes everything in him throb, aches in his blood-filled cock, sings along his muscles and makes them want to _move_ , take. He feels powerful, strong, invincible. “You do what I say,” and he shudders with his own words. “You do _exactly_ what I say.”

There’s no hesitation this time: she nods imperceptibly but immediately, black eyes watching the muscles and fierce _want_ of his body. Afraid of him. Terrified. Sam’s blood rushes in his ears, wild.

“Cup your breasts.”

Her small, pale hands move up and she touches herself, lifting her breasts like an offering to him.

“Take off your pants.” She starts to reach down. “ _No_. Don’t move your hands. Lie down on the bed and do it.”

She blinks once, confused, but obeys. It’s hard for her to lie down without the use of her hands, but she eventually just falls to the mattress on her back. The process of undressing takes her a second to figure out: she uses her toes – those weird evolutionary throwbacks to the days when everyone were primates – to grip and peel off her sweatpants, legs kicking the fabric away. Then she’s naked on her back, hands on herself. 

He moves around the bed like some circling predator and says, “Reach down between your legs. Right where I licked you.”

Her own small fingers slid down into the white curls of her crotch and hold there. Her face is blank, uncertain, staring up at the ceiling.

Sam realizes that he’s panting; he struggles to lengthen his breath, flexes his hands again. It feels like he’s running a race, heart hammering to fill his dick and heat his skin. He’s… done some things like this before, with Jess. She’d been way more adventurous than him, fearless of her own vulnerability. _Repression’s no fun,_ she’d whisper in his ear as she trailed her hair over his flushed skin, laughing when he bodily picked her up. That nurse’s outfit on Halloween, tossing him a pout when he wouldn’t wear the doctor’s uniform that she had bought for him. Laughing again later when he finally did put it on and ordered her around the apartment. 

She’d never liked pain and he’d never, _never_ wanted to hurt her, or anyone else… but when she had obeyed him, let him be in control, it felt like something inside Sam had clicked. Felt right.

Jess had been fearless, trusting. The woman on the bed is not.

“Draw a circle with your finger.” He can just barely see her forefinger move. “ _Slower_.”

She draws her own uncertain breath, then traces a slow, careful circle on herself. It doesn’t elicit much reaction, but Sam says, “Keep doing it,” and turns, pacing back to the other side of the bed, needing to _move_.

She does it again and again and again, and Sam closes his eyes, squeezes them shut so he can’t see her at all. Can’t see the way that her fingers spread her cunt open, red and hurting. He is so not ready for the complete and utter control she’s given him, despite whatever playful experiences he’d had with Jess. “What happened before,” he asks her, “when you were still yourself? When you had your power, did you do this for a man?”

“N –”

“Don’t talk. Talking’s not allowed unless I say it is.”

She wets her lips and shakes her head, a quick back and forth.

“Did you ever take orders?”

Another shake.

“Close your eyes. Tell me how it was before. You can talk.”

“I – ” she stutters, finger circling. “I had power. I could… fuck. I could make men do anything I wanted. Just swing my hips at them and their brains turned to mush.”

Sam pauses by the side of the bed, watching the slow flush of her skin, the way her abdomen tightens as she touches herself. “And when you fucked them?” He can’t touch the bed, can’t get any closer to it. If he does…

Her tongue darts out again to her lips. “I’d be on top, holding… holding them down. I was strong then, I could do that. They couldn’t get away from me once they were inside.” Her stomach twitches and her eyes flutter. “It didn’t matter if they liked it or not. I just… took. Fuck,” she chokes breathlessly, leg twitching, “I took what I needed.”

“What does it feel like to feed?”

She shudders. “Like electricity. Like a buzz under my skin, going out to my fingertips. Like I’m lighting up.”

Sam’s whole body is one giant knot, muscles aching with the effort of holding himself in place. “And this… tell me what this feels like.”

“It – it feels like… pressure. Something pushing up into my stomach.” She exhales hard, flushed. “My skin’s hot… my legs and my back keep tensing up, I can’t help it. It’s like… something unfolding. I don’t – know how…”

Her voice catches, frightened. Sam touches her then, slides onto one knee beside her. The mattress dips and she twitches in alarm, almost sits up; but then his larger fingers slide over hers and push, taking up the rhythm. “It’s okay,” he murmurs around the blood throbbing in his ears, down his throat, through his chest to his groin. “It’s okay. I know how.”

She moans and bucks helplessly as he guides her through it, picking up the pace. And all the while his own body winds tighter and tighter until it feels like his bones might crumble beneath the weight of his burning skin.

When she finally arches up into his palm, eyes squeezed shut, Sam just _loses_ his toehold on sanity. He goes slipping away, feels himself tearing at his clothes, pulling at her, desperate to get _in_ , to _own her_.

He’s over her and halfway in before she says “Sam,” in a strangled voice. Her black eyes are wide, staring up at his face. 

Sam chokes and grips the sheets on either side of her head, fingers twisting the cloth into fists. He can’t stop, he can’t, but he fights so hard, clinging. Her muscles spasm around him as he pushes deeper; she grunts, pained. “Relax your body,” he whispers. “The… fuck. The more tense you are… the more it’ll hurt. Just… do what I tell you. Do it. Breathe in.” She does, watery eyes still watching his. “Breathe out, slow.”

On the long exhale, her body goes limp in his arms and Sam ducks his head, shaking and shuddering as he thrusts into her. She stretches and clenches and he says, “Breathe in.”

-o-

Afterwards, Sam paces and paces around the small room, fighting dizziness and tremors in his muscles that feel like a whole weekend of Dad’s worst PT. Mary sits on the bed watching him, clothes back on; her hair hangs down over her shoulders, silver-white in the dim light.

Sam swallows and stumbles over the words. “How long… if we keep…”

“There was a story,” she responds, expecting this question, “about a succubus that loved a man and left the family to live with him. She lived as his wife and fed only from him. Apparently they were very happy together for years and years until he died, an old man at the age of 50, looking like he was 100.” Sam flinches and she sees; her lips twist into a faint, pained smile. “The succubus drowned herself. I don’t know if it was a true story, but all our mothers taught it to all their children.”

Sam lies down on the other bed and stares up at the shadows of sunset creeping across the ceiling. His heart feels fluttery in his chest and he sighs, slow and deep and afraid.

-o-

On a highway heading south through Nebraska, Mary suddenly closes a hand on Dean’s shoulder. “Pull over, now.” He shrugs her off hard, but yanks the Impala to the side of the road and kills the lights.

On the road behind them, a semi goes barreling past at about 100 mph. Dean has to close his eyes for just a second, shaking. In the passenger seat, Sam sits up, blinking sleep out of his eyes. “We okay?”

When Dean looks in the rearview mirror, Mary’s watching him and God he hates her, he hates her so fucking much.

-o-

Fall finds them in Tulsa, where Dean gets a job at a butcher’s and Sam waits the ticket counter of a local theater.

Mary watches TV and eats the contraband movie popcorn that Sam brings back to their rented mobile home. One day, though, he comes in to find her sorting through their guns. “I needed something to do,” she says with an edge to her voice, like she’s daring him to embarrass her. He doesn’t make any comment.

When Dean comes back with blood under his fingernails, he’s a bit less forgiving. He stands in the doorway, scowling irritably, and snaps, “You’ve screwed it all up.” Sam tenses, but Dean’s got the charm around his neck and after a moment he plops down beside her, hands hovering over the guns. “Berettas _here_ , 9mms, Glocks. B9G. Okay?”

She’s got her arms folded and a scowl on her face; then she sighs loudly and starts re-sorting the weapons. When she’s got them organized to Dean’s liking, he shows her how to strip them all down and clean their insides.

Sam goes out and gets them all grilled cheese sandwiches. Mary eats hers with grease-blackened fingers, not bothering to wash her hands.

-o-

In many practical ways she’s so much older than either of them will ever live to be: she can remember the assassination of Lincoln and bodies rotting in trenches on American soil. Yet she is a child, too, a newborn to the world.

She eats like someone who has never been taught how, the poster child for a Miss Manners ad. Food gets shoveled in her mouth at an alarming rate, she smacks her lips, she talks with her mouth open, and forget about feeding her anything remotely low-calorie. 

The first time she tries cooked cabbage, she pulls a face and spits it straight across the table between Sam and Dean’s heads. It lands on the bald spot of the guy sitting one table over. After that, by silent agreement, they never take her to eat in public.

One night, very unwisely, Dean lets her try some coconut rum. He works with three Mexican guys, a father and two sons, who talk in loud, boisterous voices and whistle at every woman between the ages of ten and seventy. For them, Casual Fridays mean hard liquor in the break room and after several rounds, the youngest tosses Dean the bottle. “Check out early, Guapo, get yourself some pussy.” Dean thinks that’s the best idea he’s heard all week and goes home to change out of his clothes; they smell like blood and death, not exactly the greatest cologne. 

When he walks in the door, though, Mary’s lying flat on her back, staring up at the ceiling and sobbing low and miserable. Dean freezes, halfway out of his red-stained shirt. She flinches at the sight of him, rolls over to sit up and face away. “Is S-Sam going to be home soon?”

Dean’s stomach does a wild backwards flop and his throat clicks as he swallows. She must hear it, because she twists around, shaking her head quickly. “It’s not… that. Not that. J-just…” She trails off, her lips trembling. Then she laughs, high and hysterical. “I have no fucking clue why I’m still alive. Why I haven’t just… blown my own brains out.”

Dean takes his coat off and sets the bottle carefully down on the table. “Is that why you were playing with the guns?”

She starts guiltily then scoots to the edge of the bed, hugging her baggy clothes closer around herself. “Don’t tell Sam, okay?”

Dean’s already shaking his head. “I won’t.”

An awkward moment passes while they both try to look anywhere but at each other. Finally she points to the bottle. “What’s that?”

Dean moves his mouth into some semblance of a smile. “Medicine for the soul, according to my dad.”

Later they sit between the beds and Dean teaches her blackjack. Loser takes a drink and pretty soon she’s lying on her side, head on top of his ankle. His pant leg has ridden up and her flushed cheek presses against that bit of skin. Dean stares at her and she stares back, her eyes glassy.

“You’re beautiful,” she murmurs blurrily, studying his face. “Really, aesthe - aecetic...beautiful.” Her eyelids flutter and she moves unconsciously, nuzzling against his ankle. “I used to be beautiful once,” and her voice makes his chest ache, “but now I’m ugly and fucked up. An ugly, fucked up human girl.”

Dean tries to shuffle the cards, but his fingers have gone numb and he fumbles to keep them from flying everywhere. “I don’t think you’re ugly,” he finally confides in a whisper.

She doesn’t respond, only murmurs a little when he slides his arms underneath and lifts her onto the bed. He leans low over her warm, relaxed body to pull the sheets close. 

Sam won’t be back until late, so Dean goes to sleep on the other bed instead of heading outside to the Impala. It’s only when he lies down and feels something heavy against his chest that he remembers he’s wearing the charm.

-o-

Sam buys her a hat, some ugly trucker’s cap, and takes her to the movies. With her hair tucked underneath and her baggy clothes, not a soul notices her. She watches a double feature, some cheesy Disney movie with talking animals and a college-aged comedy while Sam runs the projector.

She comes out of the darkened theater shaking her head. “ _That’s_ your modern culture? Fuck, why haven’t you people blown each other up yet?”

Sam laughs; he’s learned that she doesn’t really mean it that way, there’s just no filter between her head and her mouth.

In the car he makes her take the trucker’s cap off and fan her hair out with her fingers until it shines in the moonlight. The rest of her clothing follows piece by agonizing piece and he draws it out, listing each button and body part that she then hastens to uncover. When she’s nude and vulnerable before him, he hooks the charm around her neck and she has to bend forward, curving her shoulders to keep it away from the skin of her sternum.

He takes her in his lap, pulling her down hard onto his dick and she arches, then curves with a hiss. The charm leaves a red mark on her chest where it touched her for the barest moment. Sam licks it in apology and she shudders, bending low over him as his hips snap up into her body.

“Sam,” she gasps and he comes, biting her shoulder hard. She holds the back of his head and takes his teeth and cock deep, shivering.

-o-

When they both get their second paycheck Sam asks, “You, uh, wanna go someplace?”

Dean pauses in the middle of folding his clothes, still warm from the laundry, and says casually, “Okay.”

They head out to a local bar where Dean totally fails to hit on any of the waitresses or hustle pool. Sam watches worriedly over the rim of his glass and Dean keeps his attention on the food menu, though he’s got no intention of actually buying any of this greasy shit.

Finally Sam sighs and leans forward. “I want us to be okay.”

Dean shrugs and sips his beer. “We are okay.”

“Bullshit. You’ve said ten words to me in the past two weeks and that counts the four you’ve said today.”

Dean can’t help it: his lips curl. “So what, you wanna talk it out? You really think that’s gonna help?”

“I want – ” Sam breaks off and flaps his hand helplessly. “I want us to be okay, Dean. We’re all we’ve got, y’know?”

Dean flinches inwardly and tries like Hell to keep it off his face. “Aw, that’s sweet, Sammy. You really wanna go to prom?”

Sam’s eyes flinch and shutter themselves; his face loses the faint shine of hope and goes dark and tired. He sits back. “I was going to say that I’m sorry, for what I said before. I was gonna say that you’re my brother and that’ll never change, no matter how bad things get. But I guess you don’t want to hear it, huh?” He waits, looking at Dean’s face; Dean stares at the sign for the men’s restroom, his face carefully blank.

Finally Sam sighs and there’s defeat and sadness in it. He gets up wordlessly and puts down money for the drinks, leaves.

-o-

Dean’s on his weaving way back to their temporary little home when he sees Mary sprinting toward him, her loose clothes flapping in the breeze. Her eyes are wide and panicked and Dean freezes for a moment in place. _No. No._

Then her voice reaches him. “ _Sam_.”

He grabs her arms, clenching hard. “Where?”

She wrenches away, keeps running back the way he came and Dean, heart hammering and suddenly very sober, races after her.

Sam’s in the alley beside the bar and so is his blood, splattered in a wide swath around where he lies. There’s a succubus demon crouched low, its talons raised over his neck.

Dean shoots it and keeps on shooting, taking down the other three in the alley. One of them tries to take flight and he vaults upward, dragging it down to plunge his knife into stinking flesh until it lies still.

Mary’s holding Sam’s head, one hand hovering over his torn chest. Her eyes are anguished pits. “Dean, he’s not…”

Dean yanks her back and lifts his brother’s limp body. “Get somebody.”

-o-

Dean leaves bloody handprints on the surgery room window: he bangs the glass when Sam crashes, screaming like his brother needs an alarm clock to get his heart going again. It happens twice. 

By the time they get him stabilized, Dean’s broken a security guard’s arm and punched out two orderlies who try to drag him away. It’s Mary, ironically, who finally calms him: when he hits her in the face, her head snaps back but her expression doesn’t change. For some reason that winds him down, makes him feel his body and remember where and who he is. 

Sam’s got a weak pulse, they say, so much blood lost. Too early to tell. See if he lasts the night. The doctors eye him cautiously and make their reports from the other side of the room.

Mary almost gets raped by another security guard in the men’s bathroom. She screams for him and Dean breaks that guy’s arm too, striding out of the hospital with Mary’s wrist clenched in his fingers. She staggers alongside, her face wet and pale.

When they get back to the mobile home he shoves her toward the bathroom. “Get in there and lock the door.”

She hesitates just a moment, hair in disarray, eyes wide. “Dean – ”

“ _Lock the fucking door!_ ” he screams and she bolts away, slamming the bathroom door shut.

Dean finds the half-empty rum bottle and chugs half of it straight off. He thinks about his little brother’s bright red blood splattered across concrete and slings his head low, coughing against the burn.

-o-

Dean wakes up half-naked to feel something touching his face and he groans, “Oh, you stupid _bitch_.”

She rears back, too late, and he lunges up to grab her by the throat. She fights him, hitting wild, so he reaches down, grabs her by the crotch, and _picks her up_.

Mary lands hard on the floor where he throws her, lungs emptying in a whoosh of air. She’s been tossed around before, though, so she starts scrambling almost instantly. Then Dean is on her, straddling her body and pinning her down. Her hands flail and he gathers them up, slams them to the floor above her head.

They’re eye to eye and he can see the whites of hers. “Why,” he says from between his teeth, “the _fuck_ did you come out of the bathroom?”

There’s no response: she stares at him silently, lips pressed together. To Dean, it’s like he’s looking at her from the other end of a long tunnel, swimming with alcohol and hatred and rage and lust and _want_. But he can _feel_ crystal clear; the way her wrists grind together under his hand, the fast beat of her heart against his, her moist breath on his face. The _feeling_ of her makes him real and something tight and desperate boils under his skin, something that wants to destroy them both, her and him, just so he won’t have to _feel_ anymore.

Mary whimpers with fright when he shifts his grip on her wrists to one hand and uses the other to rip at her T-shirt. Black eyes fill with nothing, like she’s pulling away inside of herself and Dean hates her for that, for having that oblivion he wants. When her shirt opens up, he bites down hard on the fleshy part of her breast and tastes her blood. The tang of it hits his tongue and it’s like throwing gasoline on a fire. His whole body ignites and he grinds his hips down against her.

Her sweatpants and underwear stretch and rip, but he gets them down around her thighs. She’s still a blank slate and she can’t be, if he has to feel this, then she does, too. No one gets out clean. No one survives. His brother could be dead right now _oh Jesus God, he could be dead right fucking now, please God_ , but God hates Winchesters so Dean thinks, _Fuck it_ , and thrusts into her.

Her body flinches automatically, muscles clenching around him, but she makes no noise. Dean leans down over her, burying himself in that warm tightness all the way to the root.

Then she chokes out, “You killed him.”

Something tips and freezes. Dean pauses, his fingers curled against her collarbone. Her eyes stare up at him, wide on her agonized face. “ _You killed him,_ ” she hisses again and tears streak down over her temples.

Her wrists pull free from his suddenly numb fingers. He’s shivering, cold, _how did I get so fucking cold?_ and then her hands are on him, burning his skin through his shirt. She pulls his head down and breathes unsteadily in his ear, “He c – could be dead right now.” 

Dean sucks in a stuttering breath, putting his face against her scarred collarbone and shoving her shoulders back down, away from him. “Shut up,” he whispers unsteadily. “Don’t… don’t you fucking say that.”

When she swallows, he can feel it against the side of his face and her voice, high and desperate, is a vibration against his skin. “Y-you fuck up everything you t-touch. You f-failed your dad. You failed Sam.”

Dean snarls wild and agonized, rearing back and pulling her up by her hair. She shrieks, clutching at his hand. “No one’s ever going to love you! You’ll die alone!”

Every molecule in Dean goes still. Cold. Frozen. Dead.

She’s right there again, eye to eye with him. He’s still inside of her, hard and pulsing, and her eyelids flutter, tears spilling over and down her cheeks. She looks at him with fear and hatred and desperation and _want_ , and whispers again, “You’ll die all alone, because no one wants you, Dean. No one will _ever, ever_ want you enough to stay.”

“Don’t,” he chokes. He flinches away from her, trying to pull free, but her arms hook over his back and hold him still, buried inside her. Her face is clenched in pain, but she moves against him, grinding herself onto his dick and he bucks helplessly, body moving beyond his control. 

He’s on his knees and she straddles him, faces inches apart. She meets his eyes, breathing hard and pained. “You deserve to die alone.”

And she rips all of her nails down his back, from his shoulders to his ass.

Dean arches in pain, his head falling back and the rest of his body following. Her nails leave trails of fire on his skin, splitting him open and burning him alive. It’s pain, bright and brilliant and for just a bare half second, there’s nothing else. Nothing but the reptilian part of his brain, registering the simple _hurt_.

Then he comes back to himself and he’s flat on his back on the floor, breathing in sobs. Mary’s on top of him, still straddling his hips, black eyes frightened and hungry. She drifts her hands down on the sides of his face and her nails just barely scrape the stubble of his jaw. Dean swallows, struggling to get a handle on this, to get control of himself.

Mary licks her lips and whispers, “If he dies, it’ll be your fault. Because you failed him, and he’ll die hating you.”

The frozen thing inside Dean shatters like a block of ice, scattering outward in shards that rip his mind apart. His mouth forms a plea, _No_ , but then she rakes her fingers viciously over his skin and everything else fades away, everything disappears except for the pain and Dean is sobbing, past shame or fear, arching up into the stroke of her nails tearing at him. Her fingers go down over his stomach and back up, relentless, raking every nerve ending into hot, beautiful oblivion.

“Say it,” she whispers. “Say that you deserve it.”

“I deserve it,” he moans back, eyes squeezed shut against the truth. “I deserve it.”

-o-

Dean wakes up alone about three hours later, lying on the floor with his chest and back stinging. When he staggers into the bathroom to piss and puke in turn, the wild-eyed guy in the mirror looks like a wolverine attacked him: red claw marks swirl across his chest, run straight down his back. They smart with sweat and Dean hisses as he eases a T-shirt over his head.

Mary’s outside, sitting on the curb and smoking one of his cigarettes. Beyond her, a few elderly women pass by on their morning circuit of the mobile home park. Mrs. Tyler calls to Dean and he waves back automatically.

When he sits down, Mary’s eyes flick over and then away, lightning quick, like she can’t bear to look at him long. 

Dean grinds his toe into the pavement and finally asks, “How did you do that?” She’d taken everything, every unspoken _thought_ , and beamed them back at him. _Don’t get your hopes up, Dean, he’ll leave eventually, sooner or later you won’t be useful anymore, no one wants you enough to stay_ , and she’d ripped him open and taken it all right out, put it on display.

Mary coughs a laugh. Her eyes are red and when she turns to him, the dawn glints over tears on her cheeks. Her lip’s split and she holds herself stiffly: Dean knows without seeing the rest of her that they both bear each other’s hatred of themselves.

“I know the weaknesses of men,” she says, and stubs the cigarette out.

-o-

When Sam wakes up he spends the first few hours in sheer blind terror. Dean isn’t there and that is fucked up beyond belief or recognition. It’s been two weeks, the doctors tell him gently. His brother was a little… violent. Had a bad reaction. Disappeared.

Finally, one of the orderlies slips him a note. “He paid me a hundred.”

“Just to give this to me?”

The orderly shrugs. “Well, he also almost broke my nose.”

The note says: _Sam – Demon getting close. Gonna try to draw it off. Stay put, doc’s orders. – Dean_.

-o-

Mary says, “Go west, fast,” and Dean does.

In the car they don’t talk much, the absence of Sam looming too large. Mary sits in the passenger seat, but she’s more the driver than Dean is. “Get off here.”

There’s a mild haunting in western Oklahoma, not much more than a few bruised locals, but Dean tears through town and drops his name plenty. They leave a trail, enough to convince anyone or anything that might follow behind. 

That still leaves Sam alone, unprotected, maybe sleeping the sleep of the braindead.

When they leave the panhandle, Dean stops for food, gas, water, the essentials. He toes the gravel beside the highway and says, “Maybe you’re gonna get me killed by leading me to some super-powered poltergeist.”

Mary sits on the hood, water bottle balanced on one knee, and nods. “It’d be smart. Maybe I’ve made a deal with The Demon: if it protects me from my family, I give it the Winchesters.”

They’ve played this game for the last one hundred miles: All the Ways That Mary Can Screw Sam and Dean. Dean taps the Impala’s warm metal and submits, “Maybe you’re taking me to Hell to punish me for all my sins.”

Something flickers in her eyes and she cocks her head at him. “Would you like that?”

Dean nearly chokes on his water. “Jesus,” he mutters, wiping his face and staring at the ground.

When he looks again, her gaze is knowing. “I’ve been raped by dozens of men. On the scale of ‘fucked up,’ sweetheart, you’ve got a ways to go. Would you like it?”

Dean swings away and walks down the road a few dozen feet, far enough that she’s not overpowering, but not far enough by half. Sam had been wearing the charm when he was attacked and fuck all knows where it is now.

A gust of wind whistles over the plains and Dean closes his eyes, wishes that he could blow away. Instead he looks back at the Impala; she’s still there, hair fluttering under the handkerchief she’s wrapped over her head.

-o-

They loop down through Texas and when they pass through Amarillo, they run into a succubus nest. Dean had thought it was a Chupacabra, which was probably what they _wanted_ him to think, because there’s a whole bunch of Mary’s aunts and sisters waiting to tear him apart inside a barn.

They have him backed against a wall, grim and waiting to follow Sam, when Mary drives the Impala through the barn’s door. For a moment Dean howls, thinking of paint jobs and headlights instead of blood and internal organs. Then the blonde-haired bitches around him hiss in delight and fling themselves at the cab. Mary’s in there, scrabbling around and screaming like Hell when one drops onto the windshield. Dean’s out of rounds and he takes out his knife, raises it as he charges.

Then every last succubus drops like a stone. He staggers to a stop, blinking around at the dozen writhing, shrieking bodies.

There’s a faint sound on the very edge of his hearing, like a dog whistle that tickles but doesn’t quite vibrate his eardrums. Mary, though, holds her ears and screams, rocking back and forth. Dean dives in, shoving her out of the way and throwing the car into reverse.

Out on the highway, she keeps screaming. “What?” Dean shouts, grabbing at her. Mary’s face is twisted in agony like he hasn’t seen.

She kicks at the radio and Dean flips all the switches off. The tickles in his eardrums stop and Mary goes limp instantly. “Shit,” she swears, then leans forward and vomits all over her own lap.

Dean makes a note in his father’s journal that night: ‘high frequency sounds = very sick succubus.’ 

-o-

Mary stays sick for a couple of days and they hole up to wait it out. She operates on a circuit, staggering from the bed to the bathroom to the TV at regular intervals, watching _Dateline_ with glassy eyes. She’s grumpy and bitchy, smells like puke, and even throws something at him when he tries to give her some medicine.

Then, after he calls the hospital and abruptly finds himself on the phone with a weak but conscious Sam, she sits down on the bed beside him and leans close, trying to hear.

Dean tells Sam shakily, “Mary says hi,” and she laughs, wiping at her face with about as much relief as he feels.

He loves her. Miserably, stupidly, achingly, and it’s almost ironic enough to laugh about. He’s been sleeping on the other bed lately, too preoccupied with Sam and hunting to feel _her_ , but now that his biological clock or what the fuck ever has caught up, it all comes rushing back tenfold. He gets up fast, almost knocking her over, and slams the door behind him.

-o-

That night Mary crawls into the Impala and Dean laughs despairingly. “What are you, self-destructive?”

“Um, _yes_?” She flops down onto the front seat, her back to the door. Dean closes his eyes again, turns his face against the leather of the back seat and tries like Hell to ignore her.

She asks with genuine-sounding curiosity, “Do you hate Sam?”

It catches Dean off guard and he reels mentally. “Fuck you.”

“Yes or no question, Dean,” she snaps. “Do you hate Sam?”

“No!” he snaps back. Then, “Yes. God, fuck you to Hell.”

“Oh, He does,” she murmurs. “Sam left because of you, y’know.”

Dean can’t breathe, can’t even summon a curse to fling at her.

“Not because of something you did wrong, or something you weren’t. Because of something _Sam_ wasn’t. He wasn’t the fast one, the straight shooter, the big tough macho man. He was the bookworm and the one thing that he _was_ the best at, neither you nor your daddy ever gave a damn about.”

It takes him a while, but Dean finally croaks, “Thanks, Dr. Phil.”

She snorts and kicks the door open. “The great Winchesters.”

He follows her back into the hotel room, unadvisedly. “What the fuck do you care, huh? What, are you worried that you won’t get to suck our souls out if we’re dead, is that it?”

Mary backs up a few feet, but then stands her ground. “You’re all I have,” she says levelly. “Whether or not I like you or hate you or even _want_ you,” and her voice falters very slightly, face changing into something that makes Dean’s heart pound, “you’re all I have. It’s you or a world full of men that want to tear me apart.”

He swoops her up, pins her to the bathroom wall. “And what makes you think I don’t?” he asks harshly.

He’s hard against her belly and when she wriggles instinctively for escape her body grinds against him, sending spikes of hot, sick desire through his muscles. Dean groans and bends close, tangling his hand up in her hair and shifting to push a thigh between her legs. 

He reaches down for the front of her sweatpants and feels something metal against his wrist; hears a click and then Mary slips sideways, staggering out of his grip to huddle against the wall.

She’s handcuffed him to the towel rack. Dean bursts out laughing in relief and a bit of admiration. “Oh, smart girl.”

His laughter dies when he sees her face. The _want_ in her eyes is rivaled only by a wild, murderous look that Dean’s seen in mirrors for months.

He licks his lips, tries to swallow. His mouth is too dry. “Mary.”

She flinches away, skitters along the wall.

She sleeps in the Impala.

-o-

It’s another week before he gets an explanation. They’re heading back to Tulsa, where Sam is apparently back on his feet and threatening to leave the hospital on his own if they don’t bust him out. Dean pulls over and walks away from the Impala to pee in a bush; standing there with his dick in hand, mind wandering over the warpath of ghosts and bugbears they’ve left behind them, it suddenly occurs to him that Mary hasn’t fed. Not once in the entire five weeks they’ve been burning their way through the southern Midwest states. Not since… him.

When he comes back to the car, she’s fiddled with the fucking radio again. He swore to her last time that he’d kick her to the curb, but she’s set it to some bluesy jazz and is curled up sideways on the front seat, sleepy-eyed in the afternoon heat. Her shoulders are bare, something she only does around him: the second they pull over at gas stations, she slips on one of his lightweight jackets and hides those twisted, beautiful scars.

He touches one, carefully, tracing the uneven, sweaty skin of her upper arm. Her eyes open wider, wake up.

It’s the endorphins, she explains. “Whatever you feel, I feel. Pain causes a surge of adrenaline and endorphins, and it goes straight from you to me. You’re like… a walking drug for me.”

He takes his hands away, wraps them around the wheel. “You don’t know what tampons are, but you know about endorphins?”

“I know the weaknesses of men,” she replies huskily.

Dean doesn’t look at her, just starts up the car and changes the radio. She sighs, turning away. 

After twenty miles he says, “Maybe you’re a succubus sleeper agent that’s been sent to fuck with our heads.”

She laughs, tired and somehow angry. “I prefer the theory of dragging you down into Hell, personally.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Sure.” She considers him sideways for a moment. “I could put a chain around your neck. You’d look good with a collar.”

Dean swallows, watching the broken yellow line slip by and wondering if she can hear his heart as loud as he can. He could plead insanity or supernatural influences; but in the end, he knows that this is _him_ , hard and wanting, and the only question on his mind is whether he wants to hurt her or for her to hurt him. “Metal gray really isn’t my color. Leather?”

She nods. “That’d go well with your coloring. You’ve got such fair skin… it’d leave bruises, too, right around your collarbone. Have you ever worn a collar before?” He shakes his head. “You ever let someone hurt you?”

Dean closes his eyes briefly and contemplates all the ways that he is a miserable piece of shit. _Protect yourself_ , that was his father’s first commandment, which really meant _Protect the family_. Now his father is out there on his own, fighting a battle that he doesn’t want Dean to be a part of, and Sam is barely on this side of death. And all _Dean_ can think about is her nails going through his skin and making him pay for all the myriad ways that he’s failed father and brother and himself. _And_ her, because he’s not Sam; he’s not strong enough to fuck her out of kindness, to save her from all those men in the shadows. No, he wants to fuck her because he _wants_. Because it makes him feel _good_ , whole, relieved, to be hurt the way she hurts him. Like someone finally sees all the fucked up pieces of himself that he's been too afraid to drag out for Sam, Dad, anyone (who else was there, anyway?) and ask for help, forgiveness, or punishment.

Help, he's too afraid to ask for. Forgiveness, he doubt he'd get. Punishment, she'll give him, and he wants it so fucking bad it feels like something’s pushing on his chest.

“No,” he says hoarsely. “No, I never… really met a girl who was into that.” For all his wild and wicked ways, he’d gone for vanilla types.

“You like it, though, don’t you? You like to have someone punish you, because you think that’s what you deserve.”

He laughs bitterly. “Well, the fact that we’re _having_ this conversation is a pretty good indication of what a fuckup I am.”

“True. So let’s say that you let me take you down to Hell and put a collar around your neck. Then you’re mine, for all eternity, to hurt.”

Dean hopes to God she still has the handcuffs and pulls over on the side of the road.

-o-

When Sam opens his eyes, he lurches backward into the mattress, hospital bed creaking. “Shit.”

Leaning over him, Dean smirks. “Boo, you little bitch. C’mon, let’s get outta Dodge.”

“Jesus, Dean.” Sam grips the edge of the bed and Dean hooks an arm across his back, lifting him. “Where the Hell have you been?”

Mary’s by the door, looking back at him with a crack of light cast across the delicate bones and uneven scars of her face. “Hell,” she replies, and smiles.

-o-

Sam’s dizzy by the time they get to the cabin, too wobbly to do much more than slump on the bed. “I’m okay,” he says when Dean’s fingers hover on his shoulder.

Dean snorts. “’Course you are. Doesn’t mean you’ll be doing cartwheels anytime soon. Get your ass in bed, man, we’re all due for a break.”

Sam shifts and scoots his way to lying lengthwise on the bed. It’s a huge mattress, some monster king-sized thing that smells of mildew and dust. They’re hidden away in a cabin, some old place in Louisiana that belonged to Caleb; apparently the state hasn’t caught up to it yet. It’s a small place, just the bedroom and a loft above, a small kitchen in back where Dean has strung a plastic tarp under a hole in the roof.

Mary sits atop the ornate old headboard, chewing her fingernails and watching him. She’s wearing the trucker’s cap he bought her. “I’m okay,” he tells her and she grimaces around her fingers.

“Can’t understand how you people get through the day alive,” she mutters.

He smiles. “Good to see you, too.”

She scowls at him and strides out of the room.

Dean’s wearing the charm, knotted where the EMTs cut through the cord. He spends two hours cleaning up the bedroom around Sam’s prone body before Sam murmurs with his eyes closed, “Dean, dude, relax.”

Dean pauses, wavers, then sits down hard on the side of the bed. Sam’s heart lurches and he reaches out, nudges his brother’s back; Dean swats at his hand irritably but won’t look at him. “I’m okay,” Sam repeats, feeling like a broken record.

“’Course you are,” but he sounds less convincing this time and after a moment Dean rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Fuck, Sam. Your heart stopped, twice.”

“Well, I owed you one. Sucks to be the one watching, doesn’t it?”

Dean laughs wearily and stares up at the aged cabin walls. “I don’t know any faith healers, Sam.” 

Sam doesn’t have an answer for that and he’s drugged up on Vicodin, so he pokes Dean’s back again, and again. Dean finally scowls and swats, connecting this time. Sam giggles and Dean stops, staring at him. “Dude, did you just _giggle_?”

“No!” Sam replies resoundingly, and giggles again. Dean gapes, then puts his head back and laughs. It’s Sam’s turn to stare and then his heart swells outward in hope.

“Man, I wish I had that on tape to play for your future girlfriends.” Dean stands up and runs a hand through his hair, squares his shoulders. “So, you want dinner, princess?”

-o-

It takes a few days for Sam to stand up again, and a few more days for him to start walking slow and careful around the room, quick limps between the bed and a chair Dean’s set in the corner. Sometimes Dean will come and lean against the doorway with folded arms, egging Sam on. “C’mon, Sammy, no points for not tripping over your own gigantic feet.”

Progress is measured in how far Sam gets, but also in how many things he can throw at Dean’s head. He rarely connects: Dean sees the missiles coming a mile away and always ducks out.

Mary moves along the edges, getting a little more relaxed once it’s apparent that Sam isn’t going to suddenly collapse. Dean’s wearing the charm but Sam’s too drugged-up and sore to do anything, so she sits right in bed with him playing the card games that Dean taught her. Sam’s not at all surprised to discover that Dean taught her to cheat. Dean gets a radio working; she and Sam listen to NPR while Dean makes snide comments about the future of America.

Mary wears one of Dean’s jackets with the sleeves rolled up past her elbows; it goes straight to her knees, a big shapeless smock, and with her white hair hidden underneath the cap, she looks almost normal. The scars still criss-cross her face, but they don’t mark her as inhuman anymore; just a scarred-up woman.

She doesn’t have any recent bruises that Sam can see. He wonders about that, but Dean is actually _whistling_ while he cooks eggs and bacon, so Sam keeps his mouth shut.

Dean has a couple of burns, though, on his right arm just above the elbow. They’re not big but he’s also got a vicious bruise on his left forearm and a scrape on his jaw. “What’re those from?” Sam asks.

“Been busy while you were out.” He points to the scrape. “Bugbear in southern Colorado,” the bruise, “ghost in west Oklahoma,” pulls up his shirt to reveal another bruise on his side, “nasty-ass desert jinn in Texas. Didn’t want anything thinking you were out of commission.”

He doesn’t explain the burns, or the dark black bruises on his wrists.

-o-

Sam teaches Mary to cook; it seems like she’s turned some kind of corner. There are still mishaps: Sam has to explain sunscreen and skin cancer twice, and even then she only listens because her shoulders burn.

She stands in the kitchen, her bare red shoulders shining with aloe lotion, and stares warily at the ingredients Sam has laid out. “This is going to be healthy, isn’t it?”

“A little. I don’t know what Dean’s been feeding you,” he casts a glance at the table, where Dean sits eating peanuts out of a can and watching, “but nutrition is important to us super-evolved humans.”

A real, impish smile tugs at her mouth. “With disgusting monkey toes.”

Sam grins back, wide. “With disgusting monkey toes.”

-o-

Mary and Dean don’t talk to each other: they both talk to Sam, but not to each other. Sam wonders what happened in the six weeks that he’s been gone and feels a little sick.

Then one evening he shuffles out as far as the front porch and finds them on the steps there, sitting as far away from each other as they can get and talking in low tones. Dean’s still wearing the charm but his face when he looks at Mary makes Sam stop short.

He thinks, _Jesus_.

Dean looks up and the expression slides back underneath his skin. “Dude, you made it to the front door. Congrats. Want a medal?”

Sam recovers, flips Dean off, and eases down to sit on the opposite side of Mary. The symbolism is not lost on him; he only wonders if she’s holding them together or driving them apart.

-o-

Sam and Dean are washing the car’s interior, cleaning out the bloodstains and old French fries (which cause Dean to scowl accusingly) when it feels like something behind Sam’s right eye _pops_ and he doubles over, keening. Dean practically levitates over the car’s hood to grab at his shoulders.

The vision’s strong and shockingly clear. When it’s over, Sam curls his hand around the back of his brother’s neck and murmurs, “We need to go. Now.”

Distantly the screen door slams and gravel crunches. The crunches race closer and then Mary says urgently, “We need to go. Now.”

Sam’s fingers tighten involuntarily on Dean’s skin and he is suddenly very afraid to open his eyes. Dean, for his part, says nothing; just pauses a long moment, and Sam can feel him turning his head back and forth between them.

-o-

Mary has to lug Sam’s gear out of the cabin alongside Dean; Sam’s no use to anyone, curled up in the back of the car with his fingers over his eyes.

He must fall asleep there, because when he wakes up they’re moving.

-o-

By the time they get far enough for Mary’s liking, Sam’s got a plastic bag cupped over his mouth and it’s half-filled with his vomit. They didn’t dare stop for the last five hours but the moment they do, Sam throws open the door and tosses the bag out.

He manages to get into the hotel room of his own recognizance, but collapses on the bed pretty much instantaneously.

They talk in whispers above his head, about him and about something else that makes Dean’s voice tight and clipped, but Sam can’t stay conscious any longer.

-o-

Mary shakes him awake in the feeble light of morning. “Sam, wake up.”

“We moving?” The thought makes Sam nauseous again, but he jerkily rises to his elbows.

“No,” she replies, and it’s just one syllable, but it shakes. 

Sam’s stomach clenches in a whole different way. Mary’s face is sheet white and covered in a faint sheen of sweat.

Somewhere else in the room, Dean laughs in a low, strained way. “Jesus, Mary, he can’t even stand up. Just get the charm, let him sleep.”

Mary doesn’t turn to look at Dean, just keeps her gaze on Sam and bites one corner of her lip.

Sam swings his legs around the side of the bed and the movement promptly sweeps the world into wild, dipping movement around him. “Fuck. Mary… I don’t know if I can…”

Dean speaks again in the dark, clipped. “You don’t. I can.”

Sam’s brain slips and slides its way to awareness, and then he grabs Mary’s wrist, staring past her at his brother, who stand at the foot of the other bed with his arms folded tight across his chest. “Dean… no.”

The smile on Dean’s face is unsteady and a little sickly. “We got our choices here, Sam. Either it’s me or someone else.”

The pulse in Mary’s wrist races against Sam’s fingers. “You… Dean. You’ll hurt her.”

Dean licks his lips, smile fading like it had never been there, which it really hadn’t. It’s Mary who answers, though. “No, he won’t.”

There’s no doubt in her voice, no fear or hesitation in her eyes. Her hand twists free of Sam’s grip and she reaches down to his face, holding it firmly between her hands. “We need the charm. And… we need you to be there.”

That tilts the whole world again wildly and Sam flinches before he can stop himself. Dean, a stiff flame in the corner of Sam’s vision, unfolds his arms sharply and spits, “No. Fucking A, Mary… no.”

Mary laughs, hardly more than a hollow exhalation. The gaze she turns on Dean is exasperated and desperate and pleading. There’s something else beneath the surface, though, rising to dance along her skin: the gaze of a wolf on prey, hungry and driven. The look grows stronger until Mary chokes and turns away, eyes squeezing tight. “Sam,” she says thickly, agonized. “Please, just… give me the charm.”

Dean, who’s almost as white as Mary now, starts to speak but stops mid-breath, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. He starts to meet Sam’s eyes, but then swings away, face twisting into something caged and frantic. They’re always backing away from this: demons, they can face… death, pain and the darkness of early graves, but not each other. 

Sam pulls in an unsteady breath, sitting up a little straighter. The charm hangs heavy against his chest: it’s the first week that he’s had it back, since he could walk again. It doesn’t make sense to him, though, and he hesitates, looking between them. There’s something here, something he should know that they’re not telling him. 

He thinks about that night at the truck stop and her still, broken body lying in a ditch, tossed aside like a used rag doll. She can only do this for so long before luck, such as it is, runs out and someone breaks her completely.

Sam swallows, licks his lips, and says, “Okay. Yeah. I’m here.”  
Dean’s shoulders slump a little and Mary breathes out again, shuddering. A spiraling tension that pulls the air tight, now that the words have been spoken and the chasm breached.

Mary puts out her small, slender hand, hardly larger than a child’s. She has no lifelines: Sam doesn’t know why he never noticed it before, but her palm is as empty as the world, blank and unreadable, mysterious.

Sam looks up into her face and pulls the charm over his head, hooking the leather thong on her outstretched fingers.

He feels her power immediately, and Jesus. She must have been holding out for as long as possible, because it presses against Sam immediately and claws its way under his skin. Despite the steady throb of his head and the weakness of exhaustion, his body wakes up with the same combination of helpless want and wandering anger.

Thankfully she moves away from him to face Dean and puts out her other hand. “Dean.”

He stands like a hunted animal waiting for the bullet, frantic for and despairing of rescue. “Not like this,” he says, his voice a rough whisper. “Not in front… not _here_.”

Every inch of Sam’s skin rises with gooseflesh. He has seen his brother afraid before, but not this… _desperate_. Clawing, blind panic just barely contained.

Mary’s shoulders rise with her breath and she drops her hands. “It’s your choice, Dean. I said I’d go out, find someone else,” Sam makes a sound of protest, and so does Dean, “but if it’s you, then I – I can’t do it any other way.”

She holds out her hand again and Dean flinches as though it touches him, even as he practically presses his body against the far wall. He looks at it and her, and very briefly at Sam, his face twisting.

Then Mary says, “Dean,” in such a small, shattering voice that he goes to her instantly and Sam releases the breath he didn’t know he was holding.

Mary does, too, shuddering and leaning her forehead against Dean’s chest for a moment. He touches her back hesitantly, lifting his hands to hold her arms. It’s a light, gentle touch and Sam finds himself mesmerized by it. Dean, who hits his shoulder and reacts to hugs like a slippery eel, is touching Mary like she’s something beyond delicate, a sand sculpture that will fall apart entirely if he brushes one grain wrong.

Sam can see Dean’s face, but not Mary’s. He has no idea what Mary’s eyes look like when she murmurs, “We going back to Hell?”

Dean laughs low and strained, eyes fixed on her face, like he’s too afraid to look anywhere else. “I still haven’t got a decent collar.”

“These okay for now?” And she lifts the charm up over his head, standing up on tiptoe to drop it down. The carved emblem clinks against Dean’s own charm, leather straps tangling until they’re inseparable.

Dean’s eyes close involuntarily, his body shuddering as the charm takes effect. “They’ll do,” he whispers, and his eyes when he opens them are bright, full of a broken, hopeless love. “You got your handcuffs?” 

They’ve done this before and Sam blanches, wonders how they managed without him there. The way they didn’t talk to each other back at the cabin…

“Got ‘em,” Mary says, her fingers curled hesitantly in the front of his shirt.

Dean laughs suddenly, jarring and too loud in the tense stillness. “Where the hell did you get those things, anyway?”

“That S&M club back in Portland.”

“Huh. Figures.” Dean pulls in a long breath, then steps back and hauls his shirt off over his head. 

Sam looks away, then back, and freezes. There are marks across Dean’s chest and back, long wheeling scratches that for an instant make Sam think of The Demon and the wounds it had left on Dean. But these are shallow and red, not the blackened gouges that had almost claimed his brother’s life. And interspersed among the cuts are small burns, the same shape and size as the ones that Sam had notices on Dean’s arm.

They aren’t the wounds of a hunt, clean hits that require stitches and alcohol. They’re old and new, wounds that have not been tended or healed.

Mary’s hand slides over Dean’s shoulder, stroking those shallow cuts. The world dips and spins. 

They make their stutter-step way back to the bed where Sam sits against the headboard, watching through the aching whirlwind of his sore brain and his desire. And he should totally _not_ be hard, watching his _brother_ with this woman, but it’s Mary. It’s little Mary with her wide black eyes and the ever-present anger at the world, matched only by her terror. 

Her gaze flickers over his shoulder for just a moment and meets Sam’s. The anxiety in her eyes eases a bit when she sees him there, and that’s all he ever wanted, to take away the fear that matches his own. Fear of herself, of what she might be, and when the backs of Dean’s knees hit the bed Sam’s there to catch them both, one hand on Dean’s bare, wounded back and the other curling around to touch Mary’s face. 

“It’s okay,” Sam tells her. “I’m here.”

He eases them down, Mary in Dean’s lap and Dean’s back pressed against Sam’s chest. Dean’s hands move over Mary’s waist, pulling and lifting, and Sam shifts his own grip on the back of Mary’s neck to let Dean pull her shirt up over her head. Then her scarred, beautiful skin is laid bare before them, but it’s so different from before. She’s soft where she was bony, curves where there were jagged angles and over it all, the scars cover her like a mess of cobwebs. She is the spider and she’s the prey, too, trapped in her own web and Sam can’t help it: he leans over Dean’s shoulder and captures her mouth.

It’s a brief kiss, but scorching. It’s their first and is almost painful in its intensity. Sam’s body wakes up the rest of the way and he groans into her mouth.

Then Dean shifts between them and Sam lets him, sliding back and pushing away slightly, his heart hammering in his chest. He’s still got his palm pressed against the mysteriously broken skin of Dean’s back and he’s thanking God that Dean is between him and Mary: without the charm, it’s so fucking hard to remember that he wants to protect her and take _away_ her fear rather than inflicting more.

His fingers curl involuntarily against Dean’s back, pinching the skin. Dean’s got his mouth against the base of Mary’s neck, but he groans against her skin in response.

Sam freezes for the second time, the world spinning all around him.

The two cords that lie against the back of Dean’s neck move, winding tighter and tighter until they bite into his skin cruelly; Sam realizes that Mary’s pulling them tight, wrapping them around her fist. She rises, spreading her knees to straddle Dean’s lap. 

Mary licks her lips and whispers straight into Dean’s ear, “You deserve to be punished.”

Dean arches, a slow undulation of desire that opens his body up, an action of surrender.

Sam flinches and almost lets go, almost pushes away in shock, because this is _Dean._ The charm hangs around his brother’s neck, this isn’t _her_ doing this… it’s just _Dean_. What he wants. What the scratches across his back prove: yes, please, he does want to be punished and Sam almost runs from it, too afraid of what that says about Dean and him and their father and the whole fucking world.

Then Mary wrenches Dean’s hands away from her back. There’s a click of metal and she none-too-gently guides his hands behind his back, where the handcuffs snap in place over the old bruises that cover Dean’s wrists.

She looks over his shoulder to Sam, eyes terrified and furious and hungry and Sam officially Gets It.

He’s not here to protect Mary. He’s not here to protect Mary _at all_.

She’s got the lighter out and a flame flickering against Dean’s skin before Sam grabs her wrist. “No,” he chokes. “No fire.”

“Sam,” Dean groans, his face pressed against Mary’s ash-white hair. “It’s okay, I – I want – ”

“No fire,” Sam says again, stronger, and peels the lighter from her grip. “Could get infected.” Dean shivers, the handcuffs clinking as he strains against them. Sam puts his hand against Dean’s back instinctively and shifts closer, letting his brother feel him. “It’s okay,” he whispers. “I’m here.”

Dean falls against Sam, his breath strangled in what sounds like a sob. Mary goes with him, her mouth only a few inches from Sam’s as she whispers, “You think he’ll be there forever? You’re wrong. He’ll leave, sooner or later.”

Sam’s muscles tighten again, but so do Dean’s, and he thrusts upward against Mary’s body through the layers of cloth between them. Mary rocks with the motion, shuddering, her eyes rolled back. They _both_ want it, Sam realizes, just as Mary practically moans, “He won’t stay with you. You’re too fucked up, too _damaged_ , and he knows you’ll fail him again. You’ll die alone.”

 _No_ , Sam wants to scream, denying the charge, but Dean arches upward again, offering his body, and she rakes her nails down his chest. “You deserve it,” she pants, “you deserve to be punished.”

Sam moves without thinking, reaching around Dean to grab Mary’s jaw. She stiffens, body going still. Between them, Dean breathes hard, spine curled against Sam’s chest.

The world spins, wild and Sam pulls in a breath, trying to find a center to himself. “You get to hurt him,” he says, looking into Mary’s wide eyes. “You can hurt him, but you don’t _punish_ him. This isn’t Hell, it’s Earth and you’re not a demon anymore.”

She shudders hard, tense underneath his hand. “Then what am I?” she asks plaintively, emptily.

They’re both wound tight, agonized, against Sam’s grip on them. Dean doesn’t speak, but he moves his hips underneath Mary, grinding them against her, and she twitches, staring at Sam with desperate pleading. Her body’s laid out before him, so small and fragile, so breakable under his hand, and she begs him with her eyes to save her, or break her, or both.

Sam swallows and growls, “You are whatever I say you are.”

Her eyes crack wide open, relief and love. She turns her mouth against his palm, kissing it: it’s a benediction, a blessing, and Sam moves in closer, puts himself solidly against Dean’s back. Dean shifts a little to meet him, saying nothing with his lips and everything with his body.

Sam swallows again and snarls at Mary, “Get your pants off.”

It takes some wriggling and Sam reaches out to help, yanking down her waistband until the loose pants droop around her knees. She doesn’t bother getting both legs out, just kicks one free and then Sam slides his hand up her thigh to cup the warm heat of her cunt. She drops forward instantly, pushing herself into the palm of his hand and clutching at Dean’s shoulders.

“Sam,” Dean husks. “Sam, please.”

Sam’s fingers move of their own volition, rubbing and stroking her. “You can hurt him,” he tells her, and she sinks her teeth into Dean’s shoulder instantly, biting as she curls her nails into his arms. 

Dean sucks in a breath and she shifts, drawing her nails slowly down over his back. Her knuckles brush against Sam’s chest and he closes his eyes as they pass over one of his nipples, rubbing him through his T-shirt. His fingers work her faster and she gasps against the broken, bleeding skin of Dean’s collarbone, biting down harder.

They won’t last much longer, none of them. “Get – get _his_ pants off,” Sam instructs as he slips a finger into her cunt.

Her nails rake around Dean’s sides as they come to rest on the front of his jeans. Sam realizes with a lurch that her fingers are just above his own, and that he can feel Dean’s erection against the back of his own hand as he moves inside Mary. He’s too far gone to care for more than a second, though, so when Mary tugs aside Dean’s boxers Sam only moves enough to spread and hold Mary’s cunt wide open as Dean’s dick nudges inside.

She makes a sound of pure pain: so small, after all this, still a tight fit. The noise sends Sam’s blood straight to his groin and he slides his hand out from between them, reaches around with both hands on either side of Dean to grasp Mary’s narrow thighs. He pulls them in and down until she’s impaled on Dean’s cock, helpless and writhing.

Dean arches up to kiss her and it might well be _their_ first, too; they don’t so much lock lips as breath into each others mouth, desperate and agonized as Dean fucks into her deeply, hard jabs that make her hips buck, flinching with every stroke.

Her shivering mouth whispers against Dean’s lips, “You aren’t worth loving,” and then bites down until Sam can see blood, Dean’s blood shining on her lips as she pulls away to nip down along his shoulder, onto his heaving chest. Dean’s head drops back against Sam’s shoulder again and he sounds like he’s running a marathon, breath heaving and hitching. Sam rocks against him helplessly, their rhythm grinding his own body into arousal. 

“It’s okay,” he murmurs, to Dean or Mary or whoever might still be listening as they sweep along. “It’s okay.”

Dean finally goes rigid, breath stopping like it’s been wrenched from him. Mary’s hand is in his hair, tugging and wrenching his head back. 

Then Dean relaxes by degrees, body going limp against Sam, who releases his grip on Mary’s thighs. There will be some serious bruises in the morning and the thought makes him scoot backwards, away from them both. Dean drops limply to the mattress, his eyes closed, and Mary kneels, still straddling him, her head bent low on her shoulders.

Sam closes his eyes, putting his back against the headboard and struggling to get his own body under control. His dick strains against the front of his jeans and he shifts, gritting his teeth in agony. 

Then he jumps when something curls against his ankle. Mary’s there, her hand on him and her eyes on his face.

He stares back and she slowly, slowly lifts her hands up to cup her breasts. Offering.

He rocks forward and wraps his arms around her, lifting her bodily off Dean. She squeaks faintly, clutching at his fingers, but settles over his thigh. Her wet heat burns through the denim to his leg. Once there, she pushes her hair back from her eyes and waits. Watching him. Obedient.

Sam shudders; God, he missed her. This. “You ever give a blowjob?”

Her lips tic. “Would it matter if I haven’t?”

He slides his hands up around her throat, not tight, just holding her there. “No,” he whispers.

Somewhere he can hear Dean breathing, still ragged, maybe even watching. When Mary lets Sam fuck her mouth, though, it doesn’t seem to matter.

-o-

They sleep all wrapped up in each other, Mary between them. At some point she unlocked the handcuffs, because when Sam wakes up, Dean’s hand is stroking her bruised thigh, apologizing silently for the hurt that Sam gave her.

She has one hand curled in Sam’s hair and the other laid against Dean’s chest, just over his heart. On her palm, there’s a burn mark; it takes Sam a moment to realize that it’s from where she held the charm, twisted it until it bites into Dean, and herself.

-o-

Sam gets up first, groping for his shirt in the dark and sliding it on. According to the hotel clock, it’s 7 AM and the outside world sends a half-hearted grey glow into the room when he opens the door to a tranquil world beyond.

It’s still enough to waken his fellow sleepers and he’s only been standing outside for a minute or so before Dean joins him, his hair disheveled. “You taking off?”

There are equal amounts of resignation and panic in his voice: the sound hits Sam in the center of his chest, makes it ache. He spreads his arms wide, shows his hands. “I don’t even have my wallet, Dean. I’m not going anywhere. Just – lemme have a minute, okay?”

It’s drizzling slightly and Dean jams his hands into his pockets, staring down at his bare feet. “’Kay.” His tone is casual, emotionless.

There are bluish half-circles under Dean’s eyes and darker coloring around his wrists, swollen and chafed by the handcuffs. It’s cheap to force the issue now, when he’s exhausted, hurting, and probably not all that coherent from… Mary. And yet Sam just _knows_ that if he doesn’t ask now, Dean will smooth this moment over, a shored-up dam that will hold the water back until it breaks entirely.

So Sam takes a step forward, squarely into Dean’s personal space, and shoves lightly on his chest. Not hard: he remembers Mary’s fingernails. It still throws Dean off balance and he staggers a moment, face startled out from behind its shutters.

There’s wet hair in Sam’s face and he pushes it back roughly; there can’t be anything separating them right now. “Why do you care about me so much?”

Dean blinks, shifting his weight away from Sam but not quite giving ground. “What’re you talking about?” he asks. The tone is meant to sound gruff, but it wobbles.

Sam doesn’t back down, either… he can’t afford to. “You. Me. Why do you… why have you _always_ cared about me so damn much?”

Dean stumbles without moving then recovers. “Who the hell says I do?”

“So if I said that I think you’re a sick, disgusting fuckup for _wanting_ her to hurt you,” Dean’s whole body flinches but Sam can’t stop, he _has_ to crack the dam or they’ll all drown, “and that what we just did is disgusting and wrong enough to make me want to get the Hell away from you and her both, _forever_ , then you wouldn’t be bothered by it?”

Dean’s lower lip is swollen, colored red and bluish at the corners. It hangs open very slightly, but not a sound comes out.

Sam sucks in a deep breath, feels it shaking him inside, rattling the loose parts of himself. “I don’t. I _don’t_ think that, I never would. You’re my brother and that’ll never change, no matter what happens. I just wish sometimes,” he raises his hands helplessly, hits them against his thighs, “that I didn’t _matter_ so much to you. That we could just be brothers instead of…” He trails off, searching, then laughs bitterly. “Jesus, I don’t even know what to call us.”

Dean’s got his arms folded across his chest, shoulders hunched like something in his body has caved in on itself. He stares fixedly at Sam’s right shoulder, face broken open. “Dean,” Sam says a little desperately. “Look at me.”

It hurts them both: the empty, wandering fear Sam sees in his brother’s face almost destroys him, too, but he licks his lips and forces himself to go on. “It’s not that I don’t love you and it’s not that I think you’re not worth… _staying_ , no matter what she says…”

Dean laughs shortly; the sound makes Sam shiver with its hopelessness. “It wasn’t _her_ , Sam. That was _me_.”

Sam forces himself not to flinch or pull away. “I know. But me staying or leaving – it was never about you, either way. I mean, it was, but not because you did something wrong. I just… I wanted my own life.” He pauses and draws breath, slow and careful. “And I wanted you to have _your_ own life. Without having to look out for me. Without… caring so much about what I thought of you.”

There’s probably more here than he should say at one go, but it’s hard to stop this leak in the dam: the pressure’s too great, having been held back all this time. “Do you have any idea how terrifying that is, Dean? To know that you’d die or kill or,” he hesitates, but it needs to be said, “let someone else be hurt, just to protect me? Or that I could say the wrong thing and hurt you so bad that you might never get better? Maybe some people _like_ having that kind of power over someone, but … _I don’t_. It scares me. It’s always scared me so much.”

Dean’s lips move slowly, impossibly into a faint smirk. “It ain’t exactly sunshine and roses on this end, Sammy.”

“Then,” Sam says, a little desperately, “ _why_?”

“You think I can change? Jesus, Sam.” Dean laughs again, little more than an exhalation. “It’s been like this our whole lives, man. There’s… there’s just you, okay? And Dad, but mostly it’s just _you_. It’s not something I can turn off.”

The stark, bleak truth of that rolls out over them both, disturbed only by the rain, which has picked up. Sam thinks, unaccountably, of Mary’s scars and the brilliant, brutal way her power turns back in on itself, devouring and being devoured in an endless circle. Her scars are unnatural, a punishment, a sentence. Theirs, though… they go bone-deep, impossible to draw out of themselves without tearing apart the skin, muscles, veins, and everything else that they are.

“So,” Dean says after water has started to pool around his feet. He must be freezing, but he sounds almost calm as he considers his water-logged pant legs. “What do we do?”

Sam’s fingers feel thick, useless. He pushes them through his hair, wincing at the lingering soreness in his head. “I don’t know.”

“Do you want your wallet?” Dean asks, examining his damp toes. “I’ll understand. It’s not… I mean,” he gestures vaguely, without looking up, “it’s not great. I’ll live, though.”

Distantly, Sam sees Mary come out of the room, too, but she stands in the doorway and doesn’t approach them. Just watches. Staring back, Sam says quietly, “There’s a big difference between being alive and just living.”

Dean finally meets Sam’s eyes, and his are weary, sad, and still so afraid.

The rain eases up, a break in the shower. Sam lifts his face to the sky. “The Demon’s still out there.”

Dean grunts to accede that point. “Dad, too.”

“Dad, too,” Sam agrees quietly. 

“So what?” Dean asks, and his voice has gone back to the not-quite-gruff tone. “We just gonna paint a smiley face on this and keep going? Pretend like we’re not completely fucked up until it’s all over and _then_ you leave?”

Sam feels a small spurt of annoyance that after _everything_ , that’s the only thing Dean can think of, the many ways that he can be left behind. Inventing new ways every day to haunt his own mind.

The annoyance is quickly replaced by exhaustion. The dam’s open now and all they can hope to do is not drown in the current.

“I don’t know, Dean. I honestly don’t. I think – maybe we do just keep going, and figure things out as we go.” He straightens a bit and sweeps critical eyes over his extremely damp brother. “I don’t think we should stand out here in the rain any more, though. People will start to notice the two weirdos in the parking lot. Especially you,” he added, jabbing a finger at Dean, “you’ve got your shirt on backwards.”

Dean glances down. “It’s yours. You’re wearing mine.”

Sam blinks, surprised. In the rain, the sodden material of both shirts looks the same.

-o-

Mary sits on the unused bed, watching the television. A comforter has been drawn over the rumpled sheets where they all spent the night together and Sam pauses, realizing that she’s developed some sense of propriety.

Not much, though. She’s in her underwear, sitting cross-legged like an Indian; there are bruises on her neck from Dean’s mouth and on her hip from Sam’s fingers. When they come in the door, she eyes them both then announces bluntly, “You two look like walking death.”

Sam laughs, because there’s nothing else to do. Mary looks at Dean, then gets up and drags them both by their wrists over to the clean bed.

There’s no desire here: pushed beyond the brink of their physical, mental, and emotional limits, neither of them feels a lick of arousal, even with her half-clothed body near and her hands on them. Yet there is an intimacy and as she pulls Sam’s shirt up over his head, she takes a moment to smooth back his ruffled hair before she steps across the bed to tug Dean’s sodden pants off his legs.

“Your feet are freezing,” she says with a scowl and tosses Dean’s socks over her shoulder.

It’s only after she’s got them both stripped down to their boxers and laid out on top of the comforter that Dean starts to laugh. It bubbles helplessly up out of him, wobbly and wild.

Mary pauses with Sam’s shoes in one hand and asks, “What?” in a slightly alarmed tone.

In between gusts of laughter, Dean gasps, “Maybe you’re going to render us both helpless, then bring The Demon in to finish us off.”

She stares at him as he continues to laugh, then looks at Sam. Looks at them both and throws down Sam’s tennis shoes. 

Mary strides over to the door, yanks it open, and hollers into the rain, “Demon, demon, I call you forth. Get your ass in here, there are Winchesters to be eaten.”

Sam tries to sit up, but has to settle for rising to his elbows. Dean does even less, just twists his body until he can see her standing at the door with her arms folded, glaring at him.

Outside, the rain does not reply. Mary shakes her head and kicks the door shut, locks it, and lays down a line of salt. “Asshole,” she mutters at Dean, then crawls into bed and lies down between them. 

It’s a tight fit, but Sam curls his long body against her back and Dean rolls over on his side to lean his mouth against her shoulder, so they manage.

-o-

There’s no magical cure: the next morning they stagger from bed and Dean snaps at Sam, who growls back. Mary bitches at them both for being immature children as they pull out of the parking lot. 

-o-

In Houston, Sam gets drunk and has sex with an honest-to-God human girl. Mary and Dean sit outside in the Impala, playing poker and snorting with laughter.

When the girl leaves the room, still pulling her shirt on, Mary pauses for a second and stares at her. Her eyes fix on the girl’s smooth, unbroken skin, the easy way that she moves.

Dean reaches out carefully and brushes a thumb over Mary’s tight, unhappy lips. She flinches backward and looks away, hunched within her own destroyed flesh.

-o-

In Utah a sand creature opens up a slice in Sam’s arm. It’s not deep and Dean stitches it up; Mary, though, is sheet-white, pacing back and forth in the hotel room and tapping her lips nervously.

Sam reaches out with his good arm and catches her, reels her in. She resists, then collapses against him, hands going down over his side to the still-reddened scars where her family tried to rip his life out.

Dean rocks back on his heels, wiping his bloodstained hands on his jeans; he thumps Sam’s leg and pats Mary’s.

-o-

In Florida, the air’s so moist it feels like walking through water. Sam slow-dances with Mary outside a bar where Dean is earning them some much-needed cash. The joint’s door hangs open on its hinges and music throbs out into the night.

She’s so much shorter than he is that he doesn’t even try to show her the steps, just picks her up and holds her against him as he moves. She puts her cheek against his shoulder and trusts him to not let her fall.

-o-

In Michigan, she disappears for two days and they almost lose their minds, tearing around the small town they’re in and scaring the shit out of the locals.

When they come back to their hotel room she’s sitting on the doorstep, small and bruised and staring up at them with broken eyes.

She won’t give any explanation at first, not when Sam shouts or Dean goes stony silent. Eventually, when Sam has calmed down enough to start pacing instead of screaming, she says quietly, “Y’know, I’ve probably taken a year off of both your lives by now.”

Sam pauses mid-stride and looks at her. She keeps her gaze on her hands, expressionless; over her shoulder, though, Dean’s face goes tight and one of his hands curls around her arm, gripping it. He had known and understood long ago, when it was just Sam in her bed taking her and giving himself away.

Their love is measured in years, what they are willing to give. Her love is measured in bruises, in how much she’s willing to take.

Sam sighs and takes her hands in his, reaches for a washcloth. Dean pulls away from them both; putting her back together was never his gift.

-o-

In Kansas it’s hot and they’re close to home (never a good thing) and The Demon has been driving them for two weeks solid, burning every hotel they stay at, and Dean isn’t wearing the charm. He grabs Mary by the throat and shoves her against the Impala.

Sam tackles him and they wrestle in the dust, kicking and clawing at each other until Sam gets the charm off his neck, grabs Dean’s hair, and forces the leather thong over his brother’s head. Instantly Dean goes limp; after a moment he puts his hands over his dirty, bloody face.

Sam hauls himself up onto his knees, straddling his brother and pinning him down at the hips; Mary comes to sit by Dean's head, and they hold Dean between them.

Mary murmurs, “We need to go.”

“Yeah,” Dean says and wipes his face. “Yeah.”

-o-

In North Dakota, Sam shows Mary how to shoot a gun, throw a punch, and kick for the balls. There was a gas station attendant twenty miles back who almost got a face full of bullets from Dean when the fucker grabbed Mary on her way to the bathroom.

Dean’s sitting in the Impala’s front seat, legs kicked out sideways and a bottle in hand. He takes swigs out of it as he watches them until Mary runs over to snatch it away, puts it on a fencepost, and takes only three bullets to blow the thing apart.

-o-

In Alabama she does what Sam taught her and kicks a guy in the gonads, then nails him with pepper spray.

They catch up to her along the highway, laughing like a maniac and dancing. When Sam gets out of the car, she climbs his body like a tree to kiss him then dives into the backseat, flushed and jubilant.

-o-

In Connecticut they find another ocean and Mary sits down in front of it for hours, swaying slightly with the waves. Dean’s wearing the charm this week and so he goes down and sits beside her on the pebbled shore.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

She shakes her head back and forth, trembling; it’s not a denial, just a loss for words. “You wear it,” she chokes finally. “I didn’t think about it before, but… you wear the charm when we…” She’s shaking so hard that Dean puts an arm around her, trying to hold her together.

“Yeah, I do.”

She stares at him, eyes cracking open and dissolving. Dean remembers Houston, when she’d stared with such longing and pain at the girl Sam had slept with, not because of where she had been but because of what she was. Beautiful, whole.

Dean touches the scars on her mouth, her jaw. “I do.”

-o-

When Sam and Mary fuck, it’s about control and safety, him trying to grip the world and bend it – and himself – to his will. He usually wins, because he’s just that goddamn stubborn.

When Dean and Mary fuck, it’s a daredevil ride to see which one of them will walk away with bruises. It’s the two of them fighting everything that’s ever hurt them and more often than not they need Sam there to remind them both that they are loved.

Sometimes Sam thinks about what they do and it washes over him like cold water. The face he sees in the mirror is not one he recognizes anymore: not Sam the college student or Sam the hunter, even. The visions have gotten worse, too, more numerous and clearer in focus: sometimes he sounds the alarm before Mary and they kick dust in The Demon’s snapping jaws. That, too, is something alien beneath his own skin that he cannot control and he wonders how long before there is nothing left of what he used to be.

Then Mary will win a game of gin with Dean – both of them cheating like crazy – and in defeat he will show her how to drive the Impala. They go around the parking lot in fits and starts, Dean practically hyperventilating and Sam laughing his ass off in the back seat. Or Mary will read a whole book on biology in one night and ask Sam about frog testes the next morning while shoveling scrambled eggs in her open mouth.

So they go on.

-o-

Dean keeps waiting for the other foot to drop, for something to change and all of this to go up in smoke. He sees Sam’s eyes sometimes and feels cold. 

All it would take is a phone call from Dad to meet or a one-way trip to Stanford to disrupt this weird three-way tango.

In Arizona they sit together on the hood of the Impala under the night sky. The Milky Way splotches across the sky above and Mary puts her head in Sam’s lap, her feet in Dean’s. They take turns pointing out constellations to her, Sam sticking to the traditional kind and Dean making up fanciful, usually lewd variations.

So they go on.

-o-

They keep going, driven by Sam’s visions, Mary’s warnings, and Dean’s hunting. They stay away from the major cities, where black-eyed children lurk and where Mary’s sisters grow nests.

Sam (usually) hurts her less.

Dean loves her more.


End file.
